Phoenix Island (23 page)

So Carl told him about how he’d loved boxing right from the start and about Arthur James and how Arthur barely looked at him, let alone talked to him, other than to point out what he was doing wrong. Carl hit the gym every night and worked hard. Three months into training, he earned the chance to spar.

Arthur threw him in with Cliff, a slick boxer with several amateur bouts who was a couple of years older and outweighed him by twenty pounds. As Arthur laced and taped the big sixteen-ounce gloves and tightened the headgear strap uncomfortably across Carl’s throat, he quietly reviewed things they’d trained, cooing reminders softly as a pigeon. Hands up. Chin down. Step when you punch. Use lateral movement and mind the angles. Work the body. Start with the jab; finish with the jab. Punches in bunches. Then, as he held open the ropes for Carl to slip through, Arthur offered a rare smile and said, “Well, son, here you go. This is what you’ve been wanting.”

Cliff was already in the ring. He smiled, all mouthpiece, but Carl knew the smile didn’t mean Cliff would take it easy on him. In sparring, you went hard, only backing off if your trainer told you to. Carl respected that. He didn’t want anybody’s pity or B-game.

The bell rang. Twenty seconds later, Carl dipped a right cross, threw
a left hook, and dropped Cliff to the canvas. Carl went to the neutral corner like he’d seen other fighters do. Cliff got up, still all business, and Arthur said, “All right, son,” and called them back together. Cliff brushed his gloves off on his tank top and proceeded more cautiously, tending a wider gap and using more movement, more jabs, keeping his hands high and tight whenever Carl got close.

The rest of the sparring session went Cliff’s way, but Carl had a few good moments and did what Arthur told him, keeping his guard and his cool and throwing lots of punches. By the end of the third, he had a bloody lip, and a pleasant, buzzing emptiness filled his head. At the final bell, Cliff spit out his mouthpiece, grinned, and whacked Carl on the back with one big, puffy glove. “Woo-ee, Carl. You punch like a middleweight!”

Arthur told them to quit jabbering and do twenty minutes of stairs and six rounds of jump rope. He allowed each of them a quick drink at the water fountain, a rare treat, and said to Carl, quietly as always, “Good job in there, son. You’ll be all right.” Carl thanked him, went to the steps, and fell in behind Cliff. He’d never felt better about anything anybody had ever said to him in his whole life. “Good job. . . . You’ll be all right” from Arthur Marcellus James was like a gold medal from anybody else.

Carl stayed on Cliff’s heels, up and down the stairs, up and down, wishing he could tell his dad what Arthur had said. One of the older boxers joined them on the steps, and together they sang “I want to be an airborne ranger” until one of the trainers, a loud guy named Benson, came to the top of the stairs and told them they were horrible and laughed and threw a bag glove at Cliff. Cliff ducked it and ran downstairs, cackling like a madman, and Carl followed after him, laughing just as hard.

Carl chuckled now, remembering it all as he told Stark, but then the chuckle died away.

“What?” Stark said.

Carl shook his head. “Nothing. That’s it.”

Stark narrowed his eyes slightly. “We need to trust each other,” Stark said. “Tell me.”

Carl sat in silence for a second then said, “It was that night, that same night, when I went home, that an ambulance was parked in front of the house.” He paused, rocked by the memory. And then it all came back to him: the panic he’d felt, standing there, the whole block flip-flopping with the flashing ambulance lights, and the cold dread that filled him when the paramedics closed the back doors and his mother’s wail cut through the night, through him, through everything he’d ever known.

Stark put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”

Carl nodded and let out a shuddering breath. “That was the night my dad died.”

“Oh, Carl,” Stark said, frowning. “I am so sorry.” He gave Carl’s shoulder a light squeeze. “I shouldn’t have pushed you to tell me.”

Carl shook his head and forced a weak smile. “It’s okay. Really. Just . . . took me back, you know?”

Stark nodded. “Life is hard—and sometimes, hard to understand. Victory and defeat. Pleasure and pain. Blessings and curses.” He stood, a smile coming onto his face. “The trick is to keep moving, my young friend, keep living.” He dropped into a full split without so much as a groan, then came out of it, gave Carl a good-natured slap on the arm, and said, “Let’s do some warm-ups.”

“Sounds good,” Carl said, meaning it. He hated being sad and tried not to dwell on sad stuff.

They ran through jumping jacks, push-ups, sit-ups, and deep knee bends. “Grab a jump rope,” Stark said. He went to the wall and flicked a switch, and the big timer mounted there rang out
ding, ding, ding
, and its green light flashed to life.

“Time!” Stark said.

It felt good to jump rope. Carl loved the simple rhythm of it, the familiar rattle of the ball bearings inside the wooden handles, the whirl of the leather rope and its ticking slap against the floor. After mere seconds, he found his comfortable old rhythm, and his feet started doing their traditional dance with the spinning rope. He added double jumps and crossovers, and when the thirty-second buzzer sounded and the yellow light came on, he spun the rope so quickly he had to sprint to keep up with it.

He felt great. No pain or stiffness, no cramping, no burn in his muscles. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

They jumped for three rounds, then climbed into the ring together and moved in their own circles, shadowboxing for another three. Stark was impressive. He didn’t fight like a boxer—he stood a little straight, and his stance was a bit wide—but his punches were loose and fast, and Carl could tell the big man had real power in his fists.

“Wrap your hands,” Stark said, pointing to the wall, where sets of hand wraps hung from hooks. “We’ll do a little bag work.”

Carl hesitated. Shadowboxing was one thing, but pounding the bag was another.

Stark laughed and shook his head. “Still worried about your bones? Carl, you must learn to trust me.”

Carl grabbed a pair of wraps and wound them over his hands, loving the solid, tight feel they gave his fists. Stark helped him pull on a pair of training gloves and pointed to the heavy bag. “Let’s see what you’ve got. On the bell.”

Carl got into his stance. Stark slipped behind the bag, holding it with his hands and leaning into it with his shoulder. “Start with jabs.”

The bell rang. Carl flicked out jabs, nice and easy at first, relieved to feel no pain whatsoever. It was a good bag—very heavy but not too hard and made of well-worn brown leather—and he loved the way his jabs felt popping the bag, loved the sound of his work, the thump of his fists, and the jangling of the chains overhead. He shuffled side to side, jabbed, cut back, jabbed, dipped, jabbed, circled the bag. He started to time his jabs with his footwork. When he added a little twist to his shoulder and lead knee, the chains sang.

“Great, Carl,” Stark said, grinning around the bag. “Work in some right hands.”

Carl started to protest—his right hand had been way more messed up than his left—but then remembered Stark saying,
You must learn to trust me
, and nailed the bag with a right hand.

There was no pain.

He worked the bag up and down. Jab, jab, straight right, jab out. He started working his angles, and this made his combinations sharper.
It felt awesome. All the rust and clumsiness disappeared. Gradually, he let his punches go a little more and a little more, and by the end of the round, he shocked himself with the new power he found in both hands.

His punches sounded like rifle shots. When the thirty-second warning buzzed, Carl launched a fierce barrage that battered the bag with such speed his rifle shots sounded like machine-gun fire, the bag chains jangling like spent brass casings.

The bell rang, and Stark yelled, “Hooah!” and banged fists with Carl, who wasn’t even short of breath.

“It’s amazing,” Carl said. “I feel like I could keep going forever.”

“When you came to Phoenix Island, you were already a top-notch athlete with superior genetics and years of solid training. Here, the food, supplements, and inoculations are helping you to maximize your potential. Those things and your new blood, of course. Give it a few more weeks. You’ll be amazed.”

“Sounds good,” Carl said, thinking,
A few more weeks
? Was training like this going to be a regular thing? Then he thought of something. “Are the chips making me stronger, too?” He’d been pretty freaked out by that stuff, but suddenly it didn’t seem so bad.

“Not yet—but I can see you’re warming to the idea. Good. That’s one reason I wanted to train together today. I wanted you to glimpse the future opening before you. For now, the chips are merely studying you from the inside. Once you receive the master chip, you’ll be able to call upon them as you please, and you’ll have such power, speed, and endurance that you’ll look back on today and remember yourself as slow and weak.”

The bell rang.

Carl went back to work. Stark called specific punches and combinations, and Carl delivered. When the thirty-second warning buzzed, Stark told him to let his punches go, and Carl finished the round just as he had the first, in one long, rocking combination.

They trained for an hour, fifteen rounds split between jump rope, shadowboxing, bag work, and Carl’s favorite, mitt work, where Stark called out combos and caught Carl’s punches with hand pads. On the
mitts, Carl’s punches were even crisper and louder than they had been on the bag. They echoed off the high ceiling. Carl never tired.

“I’m impressed,” Stark said. “I knew you were a good fighter, but that was amazing.”

Carl grinned. “Thanks again. I mean, you saved my life. And now all this.”

“Carl, you’re not like the other orphans. Mentally and physically, you’re ahead of them. Well ahead. Morally and philosophically, as well. Your courage, your history, your fighting ability, your sense of honor, the way you bore up under hardship, the way you faced your own death—resolute acceptance—all these things tell me you’re on your way to becoming not only a great man but also a great leader of men.”

Carl barked out a laugh. “Me—a
leader?
I’m nobody. I
just
started Blue Phase.”

“Blue Phase?” Stark said. “What would a man like Parker teach someone like you? All of that is behind you now.”

“Really?”

Stark looked him in the eyes. “Really.”

“Wow,” Carl said, and he could feel the stunned smile coming onto his own face. He’d been wondering when Stark would send him back to camp, back to Parker. “Thanks.”

“Ever since I built Phoenix Island,” Stark said, “I’ve been waiting for a worthy candidate, whom I could train intensively and raise like a son. And now my wait is finally over. You, Carl, it’s you I’ve been waiting for all these years.”

Carl’s face was suddenly hot with emotion: surprise, gratitude, pride, and almost overwhelming happiness. For so long, he’d been shuffled from place to place, unwanted—a nice kid, sure, but that temper!—and no matter where he went, trouble always followed. Adults had gone from looking at him with hope and pity to regarding him like some kind of dangerous beast, and even he had started to view his future as a succession of cages. But now this man, this amazing man—and Carl’s throat tightened as he tried to make the moment real—this man, who was smarter and stronger than anyone Carl had ever met, was telling him . . . “Me?”

“Yes, Carl, you.” Stark put his hands on Carl’s shoulders and smiled. “Say you’ll be my apprentice.”

But Carl couldn’t say anything—he was afraid if he tried to speak, he’d start crying—so he just smiled and nodded instead, kept smiling and nodding until Stark pulled him into a crushing hug.

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
Octavia ran.

As usual, the platoon started their morning before first light with PT, a trip to the obstacle course, and a long run, which looped back to the chow hall. What was unusual was Octavia’s hunger. During the month since Carl’s departure, she’d barely eaten. She’d always been thin, but now you could count her ribs through her shirt, and her hip bones poked out like fins. Worry for Carl had stolen her appetite.

But this morning, inexplicably, she was so hungry she could have eaten her combat boots.

Dreaming of food, she ran even faster than usual and pulled away from the pack. When she reached the chow hall, the only person who’d beaten her, Sanchez, was kicking the dirt outside the doors.

“What is it?” Octavia said.

“It’s locked.”

She tried the handle, hoping he’d made a mistake. He hadn’t. “At least we’ll be first in line,” she said.

Other runners started showing up.

Tamika plopped down beside Octavia and launched into a colorful rant about the locked door. Octavia laughed. Tamika was a poet of profanity.

As others arrived, complaints got louder. People pounded on the door and checked the back, but nothing worked. When stragglers started to show, Sanchez, who’d been named platoon guide after Campbell, tried to get everybody to stretch. Octavia went along with it.
At least stretching gave her something to think about other than how hungry she was.