Cold Hard Truths 1: Vices (5 page)

Tanis shrugged and went back to eating her pasta.

* * * *

The next morning I headed to the training room with knots in my stomach. I didn’t want to see Carver again, and I hadn’t slept well, thinking about him or the warning Tanis had given me about Seno. It had taken me years of drug abuse to try to deal with the hole Carver had left in my chest, and I didn’t want to begin poking that old pain.

Inside the training room was much the same as the main hall, only smaller. Guns, weapons, electronics, screens, sensors. Everything in the room was expensive, high above most people’s pay grades. That was where most soldiers spent their days, training and refining their skills.

At the center of the room, there was a large circular outline on the concrete floor. It was a training area for hand-to-hand combat, something we each had to perfect.

“Vcue, pick someone,” Carver said easily, walking around the skirts of the designated combat area marked on the floor.

“Tanis,” she replied. Tanis’s body language was not that of someone who was worried.

Vcue and Tanis took their spots on either side of the circle after discarding their guns, knives, and, surprisingly from Tanis, explosives. I had to admit, I was impressed. Vcue started to circle toward the smaller woman, but Tanis stayed relatively still. When Vcue swept at the side of Tanis’s head with her long leg, I thought Tanis would go down. Vcue moved fast, and given her size, she was difficult to keep a close eye on. Instead, Tanis grabbed Vcue’s ankle from underneath and twisted hard. Vcue went down, falling flat on her chest. She tried to jerk her leg away, but Tanis had a tight grip on it. She immediately sat on Vcue’s back, her shin pressed hard against the back of Vcue’s neck, and grabbed the arm opposite the leg she still held, twisting it painfully behind Vcue’s back.

“Give?” Tanis asked her.

After struggling and wiggling to no avail, Vcue nodded and put her forehead on the ground.

“Good,” Carver said. “Vcue, you’ve gotten sloppy.”

“A bit of practice and I’ll be back to normal,” she replied after Tanis got off her neck. She sat up and rolled her shoulders, not particularly happy.

“Jones,” Carver said to me. So he did know my name.

After a moment of not replying, he looked at me, and I grinned wide at him.

“You got a death wish?” Bruno leaned over and whispered to me.

“Nah, I bet I can take him,” I answered, still maintaining eye contact with Carver.

I knew Carver. I remembered parts of him and his fighting style, and I knew what he was capable of. I wasn’t young anymore; I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. Still, I wasn’t sure I could take down Carver. I’d just told Bruno that to sound confident and piss Carver off. I wanted so badly to beat him, to bring him down, pin him to the cold floor, and pound my chest like a gorilla, showing dominance over the smaller man.

I dropped my Tsutari on the ground outside the circle, then stepped inside. Carver had done much the same, naturally without saying a word. Then he stood there, waiting for me to come to him. He had more patience than I had brains, and we both knew it.

I’d always go to him.

Tension left my shoulders as I reached up and stretched my muscled arms high over my head, sighing as I released the stretch. Carver just stood there watching me.
Everyone
was watching me, likely thinking I’d lost my mind. I probably had.

I lunged to swing at him high, fully anticipating he’d duck low, and I’d already be kicking out his ankles with my legs. Instead, Carver dodged fully to the left, barely missing my swing at his head, and kicking me once, hard in the kidney. I didn’t stagger, I knew not to stagger, so I reached around and bent at the waist, wrapping my big arms around his waist and slamming him to the ground. We’d learned there was nothing wrong with hitting a person when they were down. After all, it was probably the easiest way to win a fight. It wasn’t fighting dirty; it was fighting to win. So I moved over top of him, intending to punch him in the stomach after tossing him to the ground. He curled in on himself, rolling backward and up onto his feet before I could regain my footing. He kicked me once in the ribs, then kneed me with the opposite knee in the gut. My moment of breathlessness was used to his advantage. He slammed his elbow into the space between my shoulder blades, causing me to fall to my knees. I reached out to grab his leg, but he evaded that and then yanked my head from the back and slammed it down on the floor. In less than a couple of seconds he was on top of me, both my arms twisted painfully behind my back. One of his knees was between my legs, warning me that if I moved, he’d have no problem bruising my balls.

Carver pressed his body hard down against mine and whispered, “You can’t hurt me if you can’t even touch me, Jones.” He sounded pissed.

“Oh yeah?” I sneered, the side of my head pressed flat against the concrete. “That’s a pretty scar you’ve got on your face, Carver.”

“How’s your arm?” He wrenched my left shoulder hard, popping it out of its socket. I let out a strangled sound, trying not to let my eyes water. That was just the way Carver was—always knowing how to hurt me the most.

And then suddenly, he was off me, and I was rolling onto my side. I stood up slowly, trying not to jostle my dislocated shoulder. Bruno shot me an unspoken question, so I shrugged my good shoulder while grinding my teeth.

Carver’s and my relationship was fucked-up to say the least. We got off on trying to hurt each other, but we really loved it when the other one hurt us. It wasn’t healthy and it probably wasn’t right, but it was the way we were. Carver was always the best at everything he did, and I always wanted to be the best, so even before our brief, youthful trial as lovers, we were rivals. At least, I’d always considered us rivals, but he probably didn’t think I was worth his time during combat.

I gave him the scar on his face right before he’d left all those years ago. Knife fighting, because that’s how the big boys liked to play. I’d barely managed to scratch him the entire match, but I got in one lucky swing and cut the side of his face. He paid me back by stealthily breaking my left arm in two places. Now, whenever ENAD used the implanted chips in our left arms to contact us, mine hurt much worse than it should, because the chip had been relocated nearer more scarred muscle tissue. The scar on Carver’s face reminded me of the brief moment I was pissed enough, mad enough, to let my anger take hold of me and really hurt him.

This time felt different though. Carver seemed more detached than normal—something I hadn’t previously thought possible. He also seemed genuinely pissed, mostly toward me. Maybe something had changed in all these years. Maybe this wasn’t a game anymore, and Carver really did have something against me.

I pondered it as I left the training room and hauled my ass to the medical ward. Walking in with a dislocated shoulder, surprisingly enough, didn’t turn any heads. Most of the medical personnel there were used to those kinds of injuries.

“What’d you do this time to piss off Carver?” Kavric, the pretty little medical assistant, asked me.

“Does someone have to do something to piss off Carver?”

He laughed at this. He was attractive when he laughed, so carefree with light brown hair and soft honey eyes.

Everyone at the facility knew about all of us soldiers. There couldn’t have been more than three teams in total, equaling less than twenty people. We were checked daily, X-rays and physicals frequently, monitoring brain frequencies, muscle mass, bone strength, muscle tension. Most of the people in the facility knew more about our bodies than we did. We were state property, so we had to be kept in top condition.

Kavric set my shoulder, and I winced through the pain. It wasn’t my first time having my shoulder popped out of its socket, and not the first time Carver had done it. I left the medical ward and returned to my little room with the number 86 above the doorway. I’d been specifically instructed to take the rest of the day off from training and pay special care to my arm.

The hot steam from the shower did my sore arm some good, pounding against my tight muscles and sweeping over my body. As I stood there, mind focused on the blue-haired man I’d faced earlier, I couldn’t help but wonder what had changed Carver over the years. He was different, not only in appearance but in the way he behaved. He’d always been a bit of an oddity to me and the other soldiers, but now he had a different sense about him, something harder and crueler. I wasn’t a fool thinking that Carver had lived the past years a Boy Scout. Hell, he’d probably been up to things twice as bad as me, and he probably didn’t regret a single one of them. It must’ve taken something big to get past Carver’s thick line of defense, and I was itching to find out what exactly it was.

I lay in bed that night trying desperately not to stay awake, hoping for the feel of cool fingers trailing down the backs of my thighs. When I dreamed of Carver, it was never a warm, soft dream. It was always cold, somewhere between a shifted reality and a bit of a haunting nightmare. I’d dream of his cool hands and loveless eyes running all over my body. I’m not sure why my mind played it out that way, turning into something that always left me feeling like I’d just returned from a dip in freezing water, but I’d never tried to rationalize it past associating him personally with the man who visited me in my dreams.

He didn’t come to me that night, or any of the nights in the days that followed. I shamefully wished that I could admit I hadn’t lain awake some nights, hoping he’d come to me, but I couldn’t say that much for myself. During the day, he’d barely look my way. His gaze was the same cold disinterest for me as it was for everyone else.

I remained wanting a man who wasn’t there anymore.

Chapter Four

“Another attack,” Bruno said. “Over in the automaton manufacturing district.”

I didn’t stop slamming my fists into the punching bag in front of me. There was a steady gradient screen at the top, taking in the force of all my hits and jabs, recording them and telling me to hit faster, harder.

“Yeah, so?” I replied in between quick breaths.

“So? So don’t you ever wonder why they’re attacking these districts? Why would the rebels be attacking manufacturing plants and not the fundamental towers with all the powerhouses in them?”

“It’s not really our job to think about it, Bruno.”

He’d finished his daily workout twenty minutes before. So had I, but working out kept me distracted and kept my mind sharp, at least on things that mattered. He was sitting on the mat next to me, still in his workout gear, staring at the screens on the ceiling with the news playing on mute. Videos of the bombing played on the screens, showing people running from the buildings. On the far screen, Roscora Deleviv was at a press conference, with a sour expression like someone pissed in his cereal that morning. He slammed his fist against the clear podium he stood in front of, then made a motion with his hands. Deleviv was an easy man to watch, someone you didn’t know but instantly knew you liked, trusted.

“Yeah, but does it make sense?”

“Well, if Deleviv is really behind all these rebel attacks”—I kept speaking to him between punches—“then he’s probably paying people to do it to make it look like the state is in more civil distress than it is. Probably to help further his campaign. He’d pick those districts, the newer ones, the expensive ones that cater to the upper-class citizens who can afford genetic body alterations, automaton personal sex bots, you know? That kind of bullshit, to make it seem like the public is suffering and lashing out at high-end businesses and state-run facilities.”

“Something doesn’t seem right about it,” Bruno replied, as if there was an itch that he needed to scratch.

“I think you’re grasping at straws, Bruno, looking for something that isn’t really there.” It hurt to tell him the truth when he seemed so passionate and sure, but I couldn’t allow myself to imagine that what he was saying was true.

“I have good intuition, and there’s something lurking just beneath the surface that’s keeping me up at night.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. We stayed silent for a few minutes, each of us letting that thought stew in our minds.

“Sometimes I wonder what it’s like, you know? Not being in here. Not belonging to someone else the way we belong to the state,” he said.

I stopped the bag from swinging by placing my wrapped hands on either side of it. “Yeah, I know what it would be like. Living on the streets, shooting up beside one of the legalized prostitution houses, selling myself for less than half the money a whore makes just to eat, sleeping on doorsteps, hoping I won’t get sold into a sex ring or puked on in my sleep.”

Bruno stared up at me with something close to sorrow in his eyes. “That’s all we get, huh, J?”

“That’s all people like us get.” I went back to punching.

It wasn’t a lie, what I’d said to him. I’d once allowed myself to dream of a different life, making something of myself the
honest
way, but truth be told, my soul was lost to me the moment I was born. It was like that for all of us. We were all orphaned, abandoned, or left by Corxed-out mothers or fathers who couldn’t afford us. If I didn’t have a soul anymore, fine; the state could have whatever was left of me, but I still had a heart and a brain, and I knew to be grateful for the little room I was given and the few moments of peace I had every night. I didn’t get to dream any more than that.

“Well, you can’t stop me from dreaming,” Bruno said.

I laughed. “I’d never try to stop you. You’re an unstoppable force.”

“Maybe I’d have a condo. Not a big one, just one of those ones like on 233rd Street, nothing higher than the sixteenth floor. Maybe even a wife as pretty as Vcue,” he said. “And a couple of kids. I’d work as an engineer for the automaton crime unit, and we’d have dinner together as a family every night at six and game nights on Sundays. You’d come over and drink beer with me, and we’d bitch about our wives, in the most loving way, of course.” I could hear the longing in his voice, and it warmed my heart.