Phoenix Island (10 page)

O
CTAVIA DREAMED
she was deep in a misty forest, everything green and gauzy. She stood on a mossy creek bank, holding the tiny hand of her little sister, both of them very happy.

But of course she had no sister.

“Wake up, Gregoric,” somebody said in the darkness.

I’m still here,
Octavia thought,
still here on Phoenix Island
, and the strange comfort of the sister she’d never had flitted away like ashes on the wind.

Tamika poked her shoulder. “Your turn for guard duty.”

“Okay.” She sat up and swung herself out of the bunk. Guard duty. Right. She was exhausted. “This is so stupid.”

“Tell me about it,” Tamika said, handing her the flashlight. “Wait—on second thought, don’t tell me. I gotta hit the rack before my eyes fall out the back of my head.”

“Right,” Octavia said, and that’s when she heard the shouting.

More than one voice. Two or three—wait, no . . . four—at least four different people shouting out in the hall. Most of them sounded like drill sergeants, but one was a girl. A weird twang to her accent, kind of Southern, but not the Georgia-peach thing.

Then she recognized the voice: Rice, the mean, fat girl from West Virginia.

“I don’t care!” Rice shouted. It sounded like she was far away, probably in the bathroom at the end of the hall, judging by the hollow echo.

“They been going at it the last five minutes,” Tamika said. “It’s fixing to get ugly.”

Octavia nodded.

Now drill sergeants were ordering Rice to
stand down, stand down, stand down!

“Speaking of ugly,” Tamika said, drifting toward her bunk, “this cat needs her beauty rest. All two hours of it.”

“Good night,” Octavia said, and went into the hall.

She was so sick of this place, so sick of playing soldier and doing stupid stuff like getting up in the middle of the night for something so obviously pointless.
If they wanted to punish us, why not just come out and say it? Why pretend we joined the army?
Most of all, though, she was sick of the shouting. Did they really think yelling would help anyone?

Spend five minutes with Rice, watch her grin as her eyes moved over the group, studying everybody, scanning for weaknesses, and you would know, even before you heard her outrageous lies, that she had spent her whole life in institutions and was going to spend the rest of her days in lockdown. She was a loudmouthed know-it-all who steamrolled people with her big voice and false confidence, the type who enveloped timid girls on day one, making fast friends. Then, days or weeks later, she would turn her back on them—boom, out of the blue, no rhyme, no crime—just to have the ugly fun of watching them suffer betrayal and struggle to comprehend how their own trusted friend could be so cruel. Once most girls got locked up, they tried to stay out of trouble, looked for a way out. Girls like Rice, though, didn’t even think about the outside. They had turned inward, had become truly institutionalized. They didn’t get scared; they got
interested
. They didn’t look for a way out; they looked for ways to manipulate the system, ways to push buttons. Octavia had seen girls like Rice everywhere they’d sent her. There was no reforming them—and certainly not by shouting.

“Yeah,” Rice hollered, “try it and see what happens!”

Octavia could see a pair of drill sergeants in the doorway of the bathroom at the end of the hall. Diaz and . . . she couldn’t tell. Maybe Smith. No, too big to be Smith. Weichert, maybe.

Whoever it was, Octavia did not want to walk down there. But if she didn’t, they would turn on her next, smoke her for independent thinking. Who was she to decide she didn’t really need to do guard duty just because the people she’d have to report any problems to were already in the hall?

That’s the number one crime around here,
she thought,
thinking like an individual.

So she walked in that direction.

“I told you,” Rice’s voice said. “No!” She held the
no
for a long time, drawing it out like an enraged toddler.

A two-hundred-pound tattooed toddler
, Octavia thought.

The drill sergeants in the doorway—and yes, it was Weichert—shouted into the bathroom, “You are disobeying a direct order!”

Rice told them where they could stick their direct order.

It was a creative suggestion and might even have been funny, in a warped kind of way, at a different time. But right now? Not smart.

Then another voice spoke inside the bathroom. Spoke, not yelled. A soft voice.

Oteka.

“This is your final warning,” the first sergeant’s voice said.

Drill Sergeant Diaz glared at Octavia, seeing her for the first time, and pointed in the opposite direction. She didn’t say anything—didn’t need to—and Octavia happily complied, turning and heading back in the opposite direction.

She’d gone only a few steps when Rice yelled, “Stay away from me!”

Then something snapped—a horrible cracking sound—and Rice screamed. No toddler’s outburst this time. Her shrieks knifed the air—
Ah! Ah! Ah!

Oteka stepped from the bathroom, telling the sergeants, “Get her to the Chop Shop.”

Octavia realized she was just standing there, frozen by the shrieks, standing there and staring back up the hall at Oteka, who—oh no . . . was looking at Octavia now, and beckoning to her.

Filled with dread, Octavia said, “Yes, First Sergeant?”

Oteka’s face was just as relaxed and impassive as ever. “There has
been an incident,” she said, “and it is your duty to record its nature. Do you understand?”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” Octavia said.

“Good,” Oteka said, a faint smile lifting the facial scars that always reminded Octavia of cat’s whiskers. “This is what you will write. Rice created a disturbance, disobeyed direct orders, and assaulted me. I defended myself, then sent Rice to the medical center. Are we clear?”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” Octavia said. They were clear, all right. Oteka had told her what to write, and that was what she would write, but Rice hadn’t sounded like she was attacking anyone. She had sounded scared.

Girls crowded in the bay doors, their faces sleepy and frightened.

“Back to your bunks, orphans,” Oteka said.

They disappeared.

Octavia wished she could, too.

The drill sergeants emerged from the bathroom, carrying Rice, whose shrieks filled the hall like a smoke alarm. One of her knees had gone wonky, the leg jutting, heel up, at an angle that made no sense whatsoever.

Octavia felt her gorge rise.

“You will find the incident report forms at the CQ desk,” Oteka said.

“Yes, First Sergeant,” Octavia said, and hurried away. She didn’t want to see Rice’s leg again, didn’t want to see her face, and definitely didn’t want to hear her side of the story, because this time, no matter how outrageous Rice’s claims seemed, they might not be lies.

Sometimes
, she thought,
it’s better to not even know the truth.

THE NEXT MORNING,
when the lights popped on, Octavia sat up in bed, feeling wobbly and strange, and stared across the bay at the empty space atop Rice’s bunk.

Tamika asked her about it while they were lacing their boots, but before Octavia could respond, someone in the hall yelled “Red line!” and everyone flooded into the corridor, counting “Zero-zero-one! Zero-zero-two!” until they stood single file and thundered, “Zero-one-zero!”

The day had begun.

That was all right by Octavia. She didn’t feel like telling the whole platoon about Rice.

She wanted Carl’s take on it. He was smart, and he’d seen a lot. Most people only half listened, then cut you off, telling you what to think or do before you’d even finished talking. Not Carl. He would listen—really listen—and wouldn’t interrupt, and then he’d think things over and maybe say something and maybe not. If he did, he would mean it. He wasn’t the type of guy who said something just to say it.

In many ways, he seemed older. He was serious and thoughtful and something else—
wounded
, she thought, wounded but not weakened. Haunted, maybe, like he’d seen things so horrible that he could never stop seeing them—and yet he had kept these things to himself and hadn’t let them make him mean or whiny.

Kind of like her.

Maybe that’s why she liked him. One reason, anyway.

He was
really
good-looking, even with his head shaved, and once you got to know him, he could be funny.

She grinned, seeing him now down in the quad, talking with Ross.

She snuck up behind him, grabbed his biceps, and gave them a squeeze. “You got a permit for those guns?”

She had expected him to jump a little, then laugh.

He jumped, all right, but he didn’t laugh. Not even close. He pulled away, looking . . . what? Angry? Distrustful? She was so surprised, she couldn’t even guess.

“Hey,” he said, his voice strange—hesitant and fake—but not nearly as hesitant and fake as his smile.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Um, okay,” she said.

Carl just looked at her. It was
really
awkward. Her face felt hot.

“Seriously, Carl,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Carl said, and now even his fake smile disappeared.

“Did you get in trouble or something?”

He shook his head.

“You seem weird.” She tilted her head a little, looked him in the eyes, and gave him half a smile, hoping he’d respond with a clue, a
not now
glance or something, but no—he only stared, like she was just some random person, nothing between them. “If you want me to leave—”

Ross stepped between them, giving her a cheesy smile. “Excuse my friend, please. He has a difficult time communicating with beautiful women. I, on the other hand, am very comfortable in the company of the fairer sex and would happily—”

“Get lost,” she said, and pushed him away playfully. Inside, however, she wasn’t feeling playful. She felt puzzled—hurt, really. She hadn’t expected Carl to act like this, close her out.

“She touched my chest!” Ross said. “She can’t keep her hands off me.”

Carl smiled uncomfortably.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, and suddenly, she was more than hurt, she was annoyed, “but—”

“Form it up!” a drill sergeant called.

Octavia hurried into the ranks, hating that the conversation had ended so abruptly—yet not so much as she hated the look on Carl’s face: pure relief.

T
HEY JOGGED IN FORMATION ACROSS
the base, through the gates, and onto the jungle road, singing cadence. Mere paces out of camp, the jungle ate them. Trees arched from both sides of the road, blocking out the morning sun almost entirely. The air was cooler in this living tunnel, damp and heavy with the bad smell of decaying vegetable matter. In the gloom to either side of the road, dark and twisted trees with shaggy bark rose between deep green stands of fern.

Carl had never been good at hiding his feelings. When he was little, a counselor told him learning how to mask feelings was part of growing up, but his mother always said, “Nobody likes a two-face, Carl. Your openness is a blessing.”

Right now, it felt like a curse. He didn’t want to talk to Octavia until he’d wrapped his head around the newspaper article he’d discovered. He wished he had never seen the stupid thing.

He liked her very, very much—her eyes, her smile, her brains, her laugh, even her white hair, which was so different—but then he thought of the article and felt sick.

Well, what did you think she did to get here
, he asked himself,
shoplift
?

But murder . . . burning someone alive . . .

He slapped at the first of the stinging flies that plagued them whenever they entered the forest. Then, all at once, the air thickened and buzzed with the things, and the drill sergeants cranked the run to a sprint. When they all broke from the woods into the sunlit clearing
where the obstacle course began, the flies ebbed away back into the darkness to await the platoon’s return trip.

The drill sergeants led them to the starting line and stood with clipboards and timers. “You know the drill. Two by two!”

Anxious to avoid Octavia, Carl pushed to the front and ended up side by side with Mitchell, a tall Alaskan with an enormous Adam’s apple. Mitchell could run fast, and he climbed like a monkey. He, Campbell, and a wiry guy named Sanchez were the only ones who’d come close to Carl’s time.

Mitchell nodded at Carl.

Carl nodded back.

Drill Sergeant Rivera said their names, and his assistant, a tough-looking girl not much older than eighteen, wrote on the clipboard. “Well, Mitchell, you going to beat him this time?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“Motivated! What do you think, Freeman?”

Carl grinned. “I could win this running backward, Drill Sergeant.”

“Talk’s cheap, boys. Timer ready? All right, then. On your marks, get set, go.”

Carl ran down the path, letting Mitchell keep beside him. He’d pace himself for the first half, then pour it on midway, once they swung over the stream. He could sprint it from there. The pencil wound in his thigh wasn’t really bothering him.