The Proving (33 page)

Reza and Tahlia were dutifully watching the loading bay shutters, kind of sort of playing with their flashlights, kind of sort of pointing their guns, although he hardly expected them to do much if another Specter did arrive. They would die. They would use their pistols and fire wildly and the Specters would probably laugh at the insanity of it all and then destroy the kids’ shields one by one while the kids screamed, writhing on the ground, the jaws of the Specters closing in on their heads.

“Ouch! Stop!” Wei said.

He shook his head and looked down at her. His hand was in her soft black hair, clenched into a fist. He loosened it. Hairs stuck to his sweaty palm. “I’m sorry, little bug.”

“You hurt my head.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just . . .” He stopped. Better not to say it aloud. And why was he thinking so negatively, anyway? They’d been sitting here for over an hour and nothing had appeared. No Specters. Just one big, silent loading bay and a handful of pretty scared kids. Plus Gabriel.

Plus Cassidy. The Spartan boy had been standing the entire time, alternating between staring at the steel shutters and staring at the two tunnels at the end of the loading bay. He kept both pistols drawn, but not pointed, maybe because his scrawny arms couldn’t handle the weight of the things for any given amount of time. He wasn’t like his sister. He looked nervous, and every once in a while he reached up with one hand and bit his knuckle through the glove, as if it itched or something.

But when those three Specters had tried to come through, Cassidy had stayed by Wei. He’d protected her and as frightened as he must have been, his Spartan training had kicked in. Gabriel’s mother always told him to look for a person’s hidden qualities. Maybe the boy was some wunderkind with VR pistols. Maybe they weren’t doomed here at all. Maybe it wasn’t his fault they were here. Maybe, just maybe, the sun would rise and everyone would be OK.

Lots of maybes.

Reza sat down beside Wei. He put a hand on her shoulder. It was a touching gesture coming from the whiny Persian, although Wei probably couldn’t even feel it through her armor. The Ecosuits looked so stupid on the kids. They looked like ridiculous little child soldiers, the kind the Historians would talk about when mentioning the Darkest Age of humanity. Stories about war-torn countries fighting over oil resources and throwing children out into the meat grinder armed with guns that fired actual bullets. Kids who died by the hundreds for warlords who just wanted to own an oil field.

Maybe now wasn’t so different.

“Here,” Reza said, offering Wei a little silver stick. He slid his pudgy thumb along the switch on the side and light emitted from the tip. “Cool, huh?”

Wei took the flashlight, pointing the beam at the floor, illuminating an old bootprint.

“Is it cool being a free citizen?” Reza asked Wei. “It seems kind of cool.”

“It’s
nice
,” Gabriel said, hoping the boy might catch on to the different word.
Cool
was the kind of slang that the Ministry of Language tried to ban in schools.
Cool
mucked up the language. Language was important. A single language kept humanity close. Unity.

Where
Reza and his older sister was learning all these strange, forgotten words was the real mystery . . .

“I bet it’s pretty cool,” Reza said, not picking up on Gabriel’s hint. The boy certainly lived in his own head. “I like making role-playing games, you know.”

Wei sniffled, looking at him. “With wizards and stuff?”

Reza nodded excitedly. “Oh yeah. Lots of wizards. They’ve got fireballs and healing, and then some other ones can raise the dead. They’re pretty cool. I made this animation where this wizard is shooting a fireball? And if you’re playing as a knight and you hit the fireball with your sword? You can cause the fireball to explode! My friend Nguyen drew the explosion himself. It’s better than a lot of games out there.”

“That’s so nice,” Wei said. She wiped her nose on her arm, leaving a greasy streak on the spidersilk. “What do you have to do in your game?”

“I think you should find the Dark Wizard, who’s this totally big guy who has all these spell books and he’s using them for evil? And then maybe you take the spell books and you can run around casting spells and making the world a better place? I don’t know yet, though.”

“I think that would be really nice,” Wei said. “It sounds fun.”

Reza beamed.

“I agree,” Gabriel told him with a nod. “People would really like that kind of game. People like to escape into fantasy worlds.”

“Yeah.” He tapped the barrel of his pistol on the concrete floor, which didn’t seem like a good idea to Gabriel. “But I’m gonna be making war games for Clan Sparta. That’s what they want, I guess.”

“Well, you don’t
have
to do that,” Gabriel said. Reza gave him a weird look, as if Gabriel had just made an insane statement. “You can do whatever you want when you turn eighteen. That’s a basic freedom everyone gets.”

Reza shrugged. “There’s a Spartan company that my teachers want me to work for.”

“But they can’t force you,” Gabriel said. “They can’t force you to do anything. If you want to move to the city and design your own videogames, you can do that. You get a Basic Income like everyone else and you get personal freedom like everyone else.”

“My parents owe money,” Reza said in a quiet voice. “Because of the cost of creating me. You know.” He made a wiggly motion with one hand. Gabriel’s mind tried to associate the action with something, anything, but he drew a blank. A sperm, maybe? A thirteen-year-old’s rendition of a sperm, at least.

“OK just stop that,” he said, waving the motion away. “I get it. I’m sorry. I thought you were freeborn.”

“I am.” He shrugged, looking away. “I just had some stuff wrong with me, so my parents had to pay for gene therapy. Legal gene therapy, don’t worry.”

Gabriel felt a profound empathy for the boy. Why would his parents have mentioned any of this to him? More importantly, why hadn’t his parents applied for hardship funding to help offset the costs of whatever gene therapy was required? “My point is you can still do something else. That’s what makes our society so great: opportunity and freedom. You’ll get a Basic Income to live on and you can design your video games for as long as you want.”

Reza looked over his shoulder at Cassidy. The Spartan boy shook his head. “Being in a clan is different.”

“I’m not saying there wouldn’t be sacrifices,” Gabriel said, annoyed. What were these kids having trouble understanding, exactly? The world wasn’t perfect, but at least their society
tried
. It wasn’t like past societies that denigrated their poor and demonized people with different colored skin. To listen to a Historian tell it, humans had come so far. “I mean, your parents would forgive you . . .”

“Mine wouldn’t,” Cassidy said. He turned back to the tunnels. “My father would never forgive me if I quit my military training.”

Gabriel glanced over his shoulder at the Athenian girl, Tahlia. She was standing next to Cassidy, watching with a sort of transfixed curiosity, like they were all wild animals in need of observation. She had her flashlight out, too, keeping it on the entrance to the little office. The beam of light reflected off the glass window.

“You feel like adding your two cents about why I’m wrong, too?” Gabriel asked.

“No,” she said. “Humans look to traditions to strengthen bonds. Family members exert control over one another.”

“You sound like the Historian, kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” she said. “I’m a Young Adult. And I’ve taken a lot of Anthropology classes, so there.” She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Point taken.” He sighed. “If I had it my way, I’d abolish the clans altogether. We don’t need them. And we don’t need to breed certain family lines, either.”

“So everyone would have babies the
old-fashioned
way?” Reza asked. He gave Wei a goofy-looking face, bulging his eye out and wrinkling his nose. Wei giggled.

“Genetics and environment play different roles,” Tahlia said. She had a confident, almost spacey voice. She was thinking a lot of different things while she spoke, Gabriel guessed. “We’re scared the Specters are too tough so we use in-vitro fertilization to breed the best genetic lines. Deep down, we don’t think we can beat them unless we cheat.”

Smart girl. Smart, smart girl. “Are you sure you’re only thirteen?” he asked with what he hoped was a friendly smile.

She didn’t return the gesture. “In ancient times, thirteen-year-olds led armies and ran countries. Maybe we’re just reverting back to normal.”

“No,” Gabriel said flatly. “You just . . . you’re all very smart. But you deserve the freedom to be young. When I was your age, I spent most of my time playing. I drew animals in the zoo. I read books and played hide-and-seek in the park. It’s good to be young. There’s something valuable about that. And there’s something valuable about being free to choose your own destiny.”

Cassidy scoffed. “Maybe you don’t have a choice either.”

Gabriel blinked a few times. Of course he had a choice. He didn’t have to follow in his mother’s footsteps. “I
want
to be a Parliamentarian.”

“I don’t believe you,” Tahlia said.

“I don’t care if you do.”

“Fine.”

“Good.” He felt confident, then realized he’d argued his way to a stalemate with a child.

“Gabe, it’s kinda scary being inside a mountain,” Wei said.

Gabriel held her shoulder. “The great poet Tu Fu would disagree. For all this, what is the mountain god like? . . . An unending green of lands north and south: from ethereal beauty Creation distills . . . there, yin and yang split dusk and dawn.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Reza turned to Tahlia and Wei, smiling devilishly. “Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot!”

They all started laughing. Gabriel frowned, suppressing a comment about the boy’s immaturity. You just told them they needed to be kids, he reminded himself.

When they were finished with their case of the giggles, Wei shined her flashlight around the loading bay, letting the light linger on the large steel containers.

“We should pop one open,” Reza offered.

“We shouldn’t,” Gabriel said. “It’s none of our business.”

“What if people are hiding in there?” Wei asked.

“Then they’re idiots.”

“Wei is right,” Tahlia said. She shined her flashlight on the containers, too. The two beams looked like a pair of bright eyes staring back at the kids. “Specters don’t have the intelligence for critical thought. That’s the perfect place to hide from them.”

Gabriel looked at Cassidy, who just shrugged and gnawed on his knuckle.

“How about we vote?” Gabriel asked.

“Like, a real vote?” Reza asked. He sat up, surprisingly excited by the prospect.

“Why not?” Gabriel turned to Tahlia. “You’re all Young Adults, after all. Who’s in favor of checking one of the shipping containers?”

Tahlia, Reza, and Wei raised their hands.

“Opposed?” Gabriel raised his hand. Cassidy just shrugged. “Gotta vote one way or another, clansman.”

“Skye would get mad,” he said, “if she knew we were breaking protocol.”

Gabriel smiled. The thought of annoying Skye almost made him change his vote. It was petty, yes, but the girl just rubbed him the wrong way. “I’m outvoted regardless. All right, so what’s the safest way to do this, Spartan?”

Cassidy sighed a true teenager’s sigh. He looked down toward the twin corridors, then back to the steel shutters. He lowered both pistols, walking hesitantly to the stacks of shipping containers. There were half a dozen, total, and only one wasn’t double-stacked. Cassidy pointed to that one. “There’s probably a hatch on top.”

“Yeah!” Reza said, hopping up. “And I can override the e-lock! This is great!” He held out a hand for Wei, who grabbed it and let him pull her to her feet. Gabriel followed the two over to the shipping container, aware that Tahlia had fallen in line beside him, the light from her flashlight shining on the ground in front of his feet.

“You know, you exhibit some strong alpha male tendencies from time to time,” she pointed out.

“Thanks.”

“That’s not a compliment. Alpha males in human society are often a risk.” She looked up at him. “But sometimes, you
don’t
exhibit those tendencies. And that’s a compliment.”

Gabriel, surprised, decided it would be best to keep his mouth shut.

They stood in front of the container, waiting while Reza fiddled with a little wristwatch device on his left wrist. It wasn’t very fancy-looking. Like a training VRacelet or something. The poor kid was already losing points with his wide stomach — having up-to-date gadgets was popular even among the free citizens. For a Persian to be missing out on the latest tech? That was unheard of.

Again, what were his parents thinking?

“Someone should go up,” Tahlia said. “Reza, unfortunately, is too overweight. And Cassidy might accidentally shoot someone if they’re hiding inside. Also, he needs to be down here in case there’s danger.”

Gabriel shook his head. “You don’t have an off switch, do you?”

Tahlia looked up at him and frowned.

“I’ll go,” Wei said. “I have a flashlight.”

“What? No. Absolutely not. Having a flashlight doesn’t qualify you to go traipsing around up there.”

“Gabe!” she whined, eyes wide, fists clenched. He knew that look well enough: she was dead-set and nothing would stop her. Here was her opportunity to be a part of her future Coterie. A chance to participate actively with the clan members — who was Gabriel to deny her that? He’d not had that opportunity with Skye and Cleo and Ben when he was thirteen; back then, his mother hadn’t been premier. Talk of joining a Coterie hadn’t even come up. Now, he felt like he’d missed something important.

The story about the New Adults getting lost, about Skye saving the day . . . Gabriel couldn’t participate in that memory. Wei could participate in this memory. It could have meaning five years from now when she and Cassidy and Tahlia and Reza went out for their final Proving.

He sighed, pretending to debate it. “Fine.” He attached his pistol to his belt, then kneeled and folded his hands. “Insert foot, little bug.”