Dove Arising (7 page)

I squeeze him tighter, and the display of affection finally becomes excessive. He wriggles free.

“It’s 6:45.” Anka wipes tears away as if she’s mad at them for being there. “You should go.”

These two will be fine on their own. At least, I hope so. I hug them again, so that in the absence of loving words, they know how much I care.

For Mom,
I remind myself.

My biceps give a spasm of resistance before I let go of my brother and sister.

Our training begins with a review of Lunar history, intended to excite us but accomplishing the opposite.

“A hundred years ago, Earth was in chaos,” an instructor drones, reading from her handscreen. She’s young, unlike the two men standing behind her, but by her carriage I know she abandoned girlhood long ago. Her eyes are long and angled like mine; her face, nose, and lips narrow, as if someone shaped them with a razor. According to my handscreen, she’s Captain Yinha Rho; she holds the minimum rank needed to instruct trainees, and in a full-scale combat situation, she could command up to two hundred soldiers. I’ll always have to remember that she’s more powerful than she looks.

“The last oil and natural gas reserves were depleted. Temperatures were rising and so were the seas.”

Three meters from me, a lanky dark-haired girl in maroon Beta robes yawns without bothering to cover her mouth. She can’t be any more bored than Yinha, who’s probably given this exact speech to each batch of soldiers every two months for years.

My eyelids grow heavier as the history lesson progresses. Ice caps collapsed and lowlands flooded; oil-producing countries started a global economy-crushing embargo. Inundated cities constructed massive rafts and floated off to sea, the financial burden leading to civil wars and international breakdown.

“Two superpowers grew out of the chaos,” Yinha says, “the destitute but aggressive Pacifian alliance, and the Battery Bay bloc, riven with liberal debauchery, which it still tries to spread. Both spew poison into the environment and propel themselves across the oceans, seizing the few pitiful resources that are left.”

Yinha tells how Earthbound governments poured money into researching bizarre geoengineering schemes and how our scientist ancestors, from many different countries, knew the schemes would fail. They collected the funds, started constructing Base I, and brought their families with them to the Moon.

I feel bad for not paying more attention, because I’m thankful to live on the Bases. The founders thought of the Moon as a last refuge for the human species, and my family was lucky to have a place here.

To finish, Yinha holds one hand toward us, palm facing up. We join her in shouting the motto of the Lunar Bases: “A beacon of humanity for the glory of science.”

Our first assignment in protecting the beacon is to shed our loose robes and change into trainee suits. The instructors laugh at our confusion as to where to do it.

“Right here,” Yinha says.

“Change in front of twenty-five hormonal teenage guys?” The tall girl next to me wears the familiar green robes of Phi; the color is striking against her dark olive skin. Around her eyes, she has the beginnings of crinkles, radial like the veins on a gingko leaf, from constantly grinning. “See? Stripy-hair is
freaked
.”

She’s referring to me, perhaps even mocking me for being the blatant outlier in this group—or I’m being defensive because of nerves. My heart is propelling so much blood through my head that I’m getting dizzy.

But she’s also challenging a captain, one who seems to relish authority. None of us knows whether Yinha also enjoys abusing it.

Captain Yinha scrutinizes the girl’s frizzy black curls, which refuse to stay in the knot required for women, and glances at her handscreen. “Nashira Phi, I’ll tolerate your cheek for now, but other officers might not.”

A few trainees exhale, relieved. We hadn’t expected such leniency, instead bracing ourselves for Nashira’s verbal or physical punishment, for Captain Yinha to enjoy making an example out of her.

“That said,” Yinha continues, “don’t expect privacy in the Militia. Here, men and women are equals in every way. Do I make myself clear? Cool.”

Mom always told me not to judge people by their handscreen profiles, and I rarely look at anything but the name. But self-preservation gets the better of me; glancing down, I see why Yinha was terse with this girl. Nashira—who “prefers to be addressed as Nash”—gets decent marks in Primary but has a reputation for asking “unnecessarily specific” questions in Lunar History class.

The trainees spread out, trying to find contraptions to duck behind. This is the famous Militia training dome, where a flick of a switch can alter gravity, where a linoleum floor can sprout a forest overnight, where sound takes half a second to cross the room and bounce back. Rumors fly that the laws of physics don’t apply here, but that’s nonsense. They’re just manipulated.

Nash disappears behind a wall with various handholds meant to simulate rock climbing on Earth. Noting the stares I’m receiving from other trainees—sizing me up, because I wasn’t in their Primary class, because I look so young—I hide behind the same wall. But I choose a spot far enough from Nash so it doesn’t look like I followed her.

Hands shaking and fumbling, I discard my white robes, sliding into a snug black shirt and loose pants full of pockets. A tough canvas jacket goes on over the shirt.

“Done yet?” Yinha’s voice booms across the white dome, magnified because it’s coming from everyone’s handscreen as well. “Cool. We’re running a kilometer to warm up. That’s two laps along the perimeter. Get behind the green line.”

Neon green flashes to my left, indicating our starting point. The trainees saunter in its general direction; several shove one another in order to get there first.

“Hurry up,” Yinha says. “You’ve got loads of exercises before we’re done today.”

Nash sprints toward the line, showing off her long, powerful legs. Though all I want is to keep hiding behind the wall, I tail her, holding myself tall. We’re among the last to reach our destination, and we end up behind a swarm of eager trainees.
Why are they so desperate, when we’re not being scored?

“Go!” barks Yinha.

Nash pulls ahead. I hang back to gauge my body’s aptitude for running and to observe the competition. I’m of average height among the girls, but small overall; with my proportionally short legs and long torso, I need to make up for my smaller strides with a higher frequency.

While I strategize, unaware, someone’s foot stomps on mine.

“Watch it, granny!” shouts a girl with a runny nose. Strange she should call me that, since I’m closer in age to any younger siblings she might have.

By the second lap, I overtake a panting Nash, but my lungs burn and sweat trickles into my eyes. I was never good at this during conditioning. Looking ahead, I see two boys race neck and neck toward the finish line. One’s tall and stocky, pain obvious on his face. It’s the friendly landmass who fixed his hair in Canopus’s office. The other boy, who has a smaller build, takes leisurely strides that barely ruffle his reddish hair.

Oh no
. Bitterness simmers within me as I remember his curt repetitions of “sorry” on that awful day, the meek apologies that couldn’t make up for leaving three children without a mother, and his artificial civility when we saw him in Shelter. Despite the dangers in Militia, he grinned when he told Anka he was about to join. Now I understand why. He’s looked forward to outdoing the other trainees and to an ego boost.

As the Giant begins to tire, Copper Head prances past him. Then the Giant rams into his rival, forcing Copper Head to stumble onto an outside lane. The Giant’s open hostility tempers my satisfaction at seeing Copper Head put in his place.

They cross the finish line together.

Thirty seconds later, I follow in the midst of a swarm of trainees. If I’m to pay for Mom’s treatment, I have to improve, and quickly.

“The last twenty of you, move it!” Yinha commands the stragglers. She nods with approval at the Giant, who rests his hands on his knees, and Copper Head, who stands off to the side to stretch his quadriceps. “Nice job to the two who finished first. Seems we have some well-conditioned trainees.”

Immediate recognition—that’s why they pushed themselves so hard. Although training has just begun, the instructors are already paying attention to them as potential officers.

“Today’s workout will be cardiovascular conditioning,” says Yinha, “so take a moment to catch your breath and stretch. Next, we’re jumping, crawling, and doing other stuff that gets your heart rate up. We’ll finish with another half-kilometer run. Got it? Cool.”

A grid of torn muscle fibers, swollen and blotchy at the microscopic level, comes to mind. If I’m lucky, a single-digit percentage of the cells in my arms, legs, and torso will end up like that by tomorrow. Sometimes I wish anatomy class had been less graphic.

We divide into groups of five, each of which gets a hundred-meter-long straightaway to work with. The original circular track disappears, and neon lights indicate the new paths.

We sprint. We hop on one foot, back on the other. We crawl on hands and knees, and crawl on one hand. We tackle cartwheels, roundoffs, and forward rolls with varying degrees of success.

“This is how you get in shape!” Yinha hollers as motivation.

By the time the cooldown run arrives, my kneecaps pound and the room around me jolts with every step.

Copper Head finishes a full five seconds before everyone else and jogs around Yinha, avoiding her eyes.

Who is he?
The day he came for Mom, I was too upset to identify him using the voice-recognition software on my handscreen. I’ll learn his name soon enough—but more important, how do I reach his level?

6

THE MESS HALL’S THICK TABLES ARE EMPTY when the ravenous trainees troop inside for dinner. I sit near the end of the room with Nash and two other girls, my back against the wall.

“You following me again?” Nash says.

I shake my head and drop my gaze to the tabletop, wishing Umbriel could back up my denial. No, I wish I were home with my family, or in the Phi complex. Anywhere but here, surrounded by hot glares that could incinerate me at any moment.

On my right is a sensor for my thumb. I scan myself in; the little bar on the top reads,
THETA, PHAET. 2,650 KILOCALORIE DIET.

“Leave the kid alone, Nash,” the lovely girl across from me says. Her skin is bronze and freckled, her hair is wavy and black, and her eyes are shot through with gold. “She’s probably my little sister’s age. Chitra’s terrified of boys, and we’re about to see boys with
guns.
”

Biting back a laugh, I decide I like her wit.

Nash scowls. “Itty snob. Look, Vinasa, she’s ignoring us, like we’re not worth her breath.”

No, that’s not it.
I shake my head, panicked, but Nash has turned her attention elsewhere.

The tables rumble as decades-old conveyor belts carry our personalized meals from the walls to our seats—it’s nothing like having Mom ladle vegetables onto our plates and watching Anka wrinkle her nose if she smells horseradish or okra.
Are they missing me like I miss them?

The square section of plastic before me tucks itself away, revealing hot food in a circular compartmentalized tray that rises and screeches into place. Dinner is knobs of whole grain bread and a vegetable soup with bits of lab-grown beef drifting in the hearty broth; dessert is a personal cantaloupe, a new fruit the size of an orange with skin that peels away just as easily. Cygnus and Anka would be jealous, not because of the food’s quality—Mom could make even an underripe eggplant taste delectable—but its quantity. I’m going to finish every last crumb of bread, every last drop of soup, and my cantaloupe too.

“I don’t care where I place, or how much Defense pays me,” the short girl sitting across from me is saying to Vinasa, who compared me to her little sister. She has white skin and hair as orange as a marigold blossom, cropped short like Cygnus’s. “Actually, I’d rather rank low so they don’t put me on Earth recon.”