SLAM (2 page)

“You can try again in thirty days. Work hard,
trainee; I’m sure you’ll pass next time. Your session report will
be on ARCnet in two hours.”

She can feel her cheeks heating as she
interprets his statement to be a suggestion that she hasn’t worked
hard enough, and bristles.

“She
cheated
!” The words spill out of her
mouth before she can swallow them, and the lights above flicker
erratically, one of them blowing out with a loud pop. The sound
makes her flinch. She’s losing the battle against her storming
emotions, breaking protocol by using her powers inadvertently. Like
a child.
Oh shit.
She clenches her fists, purple bruising showing starkly
against knuckles white with pressure, and the pain helps her regain
focus. The lighting steadies back to its usual level, minus the
exploded bulb.

The ARC deputy commander frowns at
her, but Serena knows him too well to be afraid, even if he does
look furious. Straightening her stance, she winces at her
protesting leg and waits for his judgment.
Though if he wants me to do
labour
, he’s
gonna have to wait ‘til the medicos clear me.
Always a fidget, she hopes he knows it’s pain – not
childishness – making her wriggle when she has to shift her weight
again, unable to hold the attentive pose.

He sighs and rakes shoulder-length
brown hair out of his eyes, then rubs his stubbly face like he’s
exhausted. “You’re arrogant. Part of it is my fault, for
encouraging you to test so early, but you
must
learn to keep your emotions
under control, and stop believing you’re better than everyone else.
We couldn’t trust you on a mission now, even if you did pass.
You’ll see Johan every day this month for extra classes, and when
he tells me you’ve improved, you can try again.”

It’s one of the longest speeches
she has ever heard out of the stoic man’s mouth, and she pauses in
surprise for a moment. Then she realizes what he’s said, and
scowls.
Awesome.
Not only is her injured leg threatening to collapse under
her, but now she’s racked up another set of punishment classes.
Johan, the main recruit trainer, is a bully … punishment duties,
extra work, physical pain – you name it. ‘Life skills,’ he calls
his teaching methods. Torture, more like it.
Next week is going to suck
. She’s
already scored recycling duty for ‘back chatting’ one of her
teachers.
Just ‘cause I pointed out an
obvious error in his lesson, I have to haul plastics all week? He
should be doing it for being an idiot.
And
now this!

Kion’s weathered face softens slightly, but
she refuses to meet his eyes. She doesn’t want his pity. It doesn’t
matter if he feels bad for her – she failed. It’s his job to make
sure operatives are ready for the reality of a world where
telepaths are hunted as soon as they set foot outside the safety of
their headquarters, and that means that right now he can’t be on
her side.

He flicks his fingers and her kit bag rises
into the air, hovering next to her in unspoken dismissal until she
obediently fastens a mental grip around it. Only then does he
release his hold. Glowering, she pulls at it telekinetically, so
that it follows in her wake as she hobbles away. Her power and
control are still volatile, though, emotional and physical distress
making her concentration waver, and the bag jerks in the air as it
moves after her. Usually this would embarrass her, but she’s too
upset to care. She trudges out of the gloomy Arena, leaving its
replica streets and alleys behind her, and deliberately avoids
looking up at the lanky girl who unfolds herself from the wall next
to the road, smirking. The same road where Serena had been writhing
in pain scant minutes before.

She doesn’t head to Medical. She knows she
will need to, eventually, but right now she doesn’t want to face
anyone else. Or perhaps it’s more that she doesn’t feel like
obeying orders. Call it a rebellious streak. She chooses the long
way around the back of the squat training block, so she doesn’t
have to pass the often-crowded mess hall, and the five-minute walk
back to the small dorm room she shares with two other teenage girls
feels like it takes weeks. It also lasts about ten minutes longer
than it should. The metal corridors echo with footsteps, but she
manages to avoid bumping into anyone by taking short sojourns in
convenient storage units or empty rooms.

By the time she finally limps through her
door, she’s almost hopping, unable to put weight on her injured
leg. She carefully strips off her black shock suit, trying not to
flinch, and Young Shannon gives her a sympathetic smile. Serena
flops angrily, but carefully, onto her bunk.

“Better luck next time,” her other bunkmate,
Jue, mutters in a voice not totally devoid of sincerity.

The two sidle out the door, leaving Serena in
peace with her defeat, and she watches them go without changing her
expression.

The three of them are on friendly
enough terms, but mostly they were just thrown together by
circumstance. Honestly speaking, she wouldn’t be sorry to see the
last of them. If she’d passed the Arena today, she’d be jubilantly
moving her
meagre
possessions over to the
rowdy chaos of the Barracks right now, instead of lying here
stewing in the wake of two girls she has nothing in common with.
Her closest friends are older and have already graded up, and her
dorm-mates know she doesn’t want to be here. More than that, they
know she has little patience for their childish antics and
preoccupation with romance.

She snorts as her pale eyes land
on Jue’s holo-image of Gav Belias, one of the handsomer heroes of
the City Watch.
Oooh, what a hunk. I just
want to grow up and marry him. Blech.
His
sparkling, honey-brown eyes and slight, secretive grin make it feel
like he’s mocking her, and in a fit of pique, she twitches a finger
at the holo, sending her telekinetic ‘muscles’ lashing
out.

The picture flickers, and then disappears,
leaving the dark grey wall blank but for the fat vertical stripes
of texture on the wall – typical of the shipping containers that
make up most of headquarters. She twists her mouth to one side,
hoping she didn’t break the little machine – one of the only
personal possessions in the room – then shrugs. She’ll check it
later, and buy a new one if she did. She’s in an awful mood, but
that’s not Jue’s fault. Even if the girl does have terrible taste
for slack-jawed idiots with dimples deep enough to lose a fingertip
in.

She still can’t believe she failed
the Arena. Shot in the arse, at that! She groans and drops her chin
heavily onto her chest, the thin material of her undershirt
sticking to her sweaty skin. She’ll be the laughing stock of ARC,
and that traitor Abial – her one-time friend – will probably be
leading the crowd. All this time, helping each other through
lessons, working together on projects ... and it seems that status
is actually more important than ten years of friendship. Important
enough to exploit intimate knowledge about Serena – the knowledge
of her
defences
, no less! – to mess up
the biggest day of her life.

Serena knows she’s the best tactical student
ARC has ever had. That’s what the scores say, anyway. But it’s just
not translating. She’s successfully run the Arena an unheard-of
four times in training sessions, and completed her first trial
before she even turned fifteen. Nobody else works as hard as she
does, especially no one as young. When it comes down to the
operative test, though, everything seems to go wrong.
Repeatedly.

Maybe having to face an entire
team of trained operatives is a bit different from practicing with
other students,
a little voice in her head
whispers.

She scowls. All that extra time
she’s dedicated to studying, meditating, practicing, and she’s
messed up
again
.
A trap – a single powerful image, projected by someone who knows
her weakness – caused her to falter. She dropped her mental shields
in a split second of distress, and in that moment, the rubber
bullets started smashing into her side, lifting her off her feet
and sending her flying.

Crushing her hopes of getting her operative’s
pips – the badge that will mark her as a soldier and show she can
be trusted to leave the safety of ARC headquarters. And pushing
back the day when she can finally go after her missing brother,
with the equipment and support she knows she needs.

Those things – that equipment – can only come
from ARC. ARC, the Anti-Reprogramming Collective, is the one thing
that fights the insidious hold of the government agency known as
the Institute. In a world fraught with danger for someone like her
– a Psionic, possessing telepathic powers – only ARC is safe.
Originally formed by accident when three telepaths on the run
banded together, and now a sprawling underground community, ARC is
kept secure by thick steel and operatives trained to hide their
powers while they forage and purloin necessary supplies. They are
the resistance. A single hope in the fight against the
Institute.

But for Serena, ARC’s safety isn’t
enough. Hiding while the Institute uses Psionics – uses
her brother
–
to gather military intelligence, to hunt and find
those who would rebel, to
kill ...
that’s not something she can do. The driving
force in her life is the knowledge that her baby brother is lost,
and she won’t stop trying to find him until she succeeds or dies in
the attempt. Once she becomes an operative, she’ll have proven that
she can go out into the world without bringing the full rage of the
Institute down upon their heads. Then, and only then, will she be
able to ask for a team, to propose a mission. To go after Damon
with armour, and weapons, and other warriors.

She presses a scraped hand to the raw
meat-coloured bruising that mottles the back of her hip and thigh,
visible even through her white undershorts. The flesh is hot,
swollen, and throbbing so badly she swears she can almost see it
pulsing with her heartbeat. Sighing, she inputs a request for a
cold pack, and waits for the automatic vacuum tube system to drop
it into the locker by her feet.

Moments later, a dull
thunk
lets her know it’s
arrived. She wriggles around on her thin foam mattress to grab it,
and holds it gently against the worst of the bruising, hissing as
it makes contact. Three bullets connected in almost the same spot,
and the ugly mark they left looks like a three-petalled flower,
each petal the size of a fist. But the cold seeps into her muscle
and numbs the bone-deep injury, cooling her still-sparking temper
as well.

It was an unfair attack, but in
the Arena, failure is failure. Never mind that no one out in the
real world could do what Abial had done. She flinches away from
thinking about the broken form of her baby brother – a manufactured
picture designed to shock and hurt. A manufactured picture that
worked because Abial had known how to send it. Outside, on a
mission, there’s no way anyone could be familiar enough with her
telepathic frequencies to penetrate her mental
defences
like that. Or know her well enough to project such an
effectively debilitating image. But Abial had known how, because
they’d practiced together for so long. And she’d used it against
Serena, sneaking a vicious thought needle through her protections.
Showing her the thing she feared most: her baby brother, bruised
and broken. Unsaveable. Dead.

Once Serena wavered, distracted, another
operative’s slashing thought form – a mental weapon as effective as
any physical spear – had ripped her concentration to shreds. Her
psionic protection – the invisible but solid bubble surrounding her
to cushion blows – was destroyed. So instead of going around her
running body, the rubber bullets used in the Arena had slammed into
her. If the training gun had been one of the energy weapons used by
the Institute, she’d be dead, bled out from a shredded artery and
shattered femur.

She clenches her jaw, anger
closing her throat. She turned sixteen seven weeks ago. You aren’t
even allowed to
try
until you’re sixteen, and then only if you’ve completed all
the pre-courses. Serena’s gone into the Arena twice, now, and her
second attempt – today – was thwarted by the very girl who’d been
her training companion for her entire life. Abial, who had passed
the Arena at the age of sixteen and five months, after two
unsuccessful attempts, making her the youngest qualified operative
ever. They’d iced each other’s hard-to-reach bruises, stretched
cramping muscles and beaten each other bloody with good-natured
smiles. They’d grown up together, pitting themselves against one
another and working as a team to hone their skills. Throughout
childhood and into adolescence, they had been the closest trainees
in age and skill, and thus pushed together. Even back when neither
of them wanted to be actual soldiers, and were just training
because it was required of every Psionic at ARC, they were at least
friends.

Two years ago, when Damon was
taken in the same raid that nearly killed Abial, everything
changed. Now, instead of needing to qualify just so they’d be
allowed outside unsupervised, rather than being forced to remain
underground for their own safety, they wanted to be part of the
bigger picture. They wanted vengeance for their pain. They wanted
to join the ranks of the ARC operatives who
fought
. And so, working together,
they’d learned more and faster than anyone had before
them.