“Good afternoon! I do hope your meal was satisfactory and the room temperature is to your liking.” I actually care a little about how much food they’re getting, but that’s not why I said that.
“Trying to establish a rapport? We going by the book now?” The teen in the chair says with an edge in her voice. Coming into this, I knew that the young men were stronger than me, but this girl looks it too. Is it that she’s older? I’ll have to ask later.
“I planned to start there, unless you have something interesting in mind?” If she wants to start acknowledging what this is, why not? I walk over to the table they provided, with a few tools arranged for me. Nice. I sit on the edge and take a piece of my leftover sandwich and start eating it.
“No proposal? No deal you want to try? That’s a little disappointing,” pause to take another bite and talk with my mouth full, “You were off to a good start.”
A few minutes of silence later, I put one of my precious cookies on a napkin on the edge of the table and work to spin her to face it. “With a body like yours, you probably need more than the rations you’re getting.”
“Are you checking me out?” She asks with a tone of surprise.
“Maybe a little.” I do my best to wink flirtatiously, but I doubt I managed it.
“Well now I’m curious. Curious about the girl that gets special treatment. Who are you?” she tilts her head in question.
I let an over-excited grin bloom on my face and bounce on my toes. “Oh! I like this game. We trade questions. You answer mine, and I answer yours.”
“What if you evade my questions?”
“You get food.”
“And if I evade yours?”
“Depends on how clever I think your reply is. Since you went first, I am Instructor Novarro. And you are?”
“Jamie Salcedo.” My mind twitches at the name, deviously close to my Jamie’s name. I take out my phone and see that there is in fact a J. Salcedo in the program.
“Girlfriend texting you?” She asks. I grin.
“No, she isn’t,” I place the cookie in her lap and put an energy bar on the table. “Where were you selected from?”
“Oh come on, that shouldn’t count as my question! That’s such a cheat!” I break the cookie in her lap in half and start eating it. “Noooo.”
“That was a learning fail. Small penalty. Now I’ll ask again, where were you selected from?”
She sighs, “A southside Halfway house near old Arizona.” I put the bar in her lap.
“Good. See? You’re getting it. Your turn,”
“Did you really kill an assassin last week?” Oh? Now that’s a solid gossip point.
“Sure did.” I pull a few pieces of chicken wrapped in grease paper and lay them out on the table. I see I have her rapt attention now.
“How did you get into this training program?” I’m intentionally driving to more personal questions to see where her limit is. I can practically see her walls coming up.
“I was nominated.” She initially had a straight face, but as I stare at her, waiting for more she smirks. In response I whip my arm around and slap her with a crack.
“Not the time to get cute, Jamie. Gather yourself and let’s try again.” She takes a deep breath with her eyes closed. When she opens them again, the surprise is gone and she has a focus in them that wasn’t here earlier.
“I’m not playing this game anymore.” If you’re losing, change the game. Good tactic. Games are risky as either side can stop obeying the rules at any time. Don’t finish the game, however, you don’t get rewards.
I collect the food and put it back in my pockets. I didn’t have any more squirreled away, so I guess I was fortunate she stopped. I hear a little whimper as the last of it disappears. She must be really hungry, and I kinda feel bad for teasing her with food. Blarg, work to do.
“The problem is, I still want to know how you got into this training.” She shrugs at me.
The next twenty minutes were mostly me just beating her up and using pressure points, repeating my question until I didn’t care anymore. Frustrated and figuring I’d gotten enough, I’ll try one more tactic and be done with this. I shamefully started punching her in the chest.
There was some shouting and some attempts to dodge by twisting, but in the end, sobbing tears told me something more.
“I was sponsored, okay? I initiated into some decent skills that someone liked and I got picked up, they hired me a trainer to get me more skills to qualify to get here, and when my track told us we succeeded, I got a spot. I’m not going to tell you their names, or anything else. No matter how traumatized my boobs get.”
She looks ready to pass out from the pain, so that tracks. Holyshit, though. She has a Track and she’s here? How many other recruits here have a track?
“Okay.” I tell her as I take off the gloves and tuck them where my pocket square should go. Salcedo’s relief shows as she slumps forward and continues crying. I drag the chair with her in it to the door, block with my body to enter the code, and drag her out on the stoop so she’s facing the closed door and away from the others.
I put the chicken and the bar in her lap and slice the tape on her left arm and back away. As soon as I see her start working to free herself I keep moving and duck into the office attached to the stand alone interrogation room for a brief time out and to watch one of the instructors work. To my surprise, Marks was sitting in the office staring through the glass.
An athletic, borderline buff boy sat there with a ragged shirt and a swollen face, he was crying and yammering. When I look back to Marks, he looks up at me and asked. “Another quick one for you?”
“Forty five minutes. Recruit wanted to play a game. I played along until she didn’t and then I went for one more piece of info with some tactile encouragement. Took a solid half hour of that to get it. I think she did well.”
“We’ll look at the tape later. This guy came in with a chip on his shoulder and we caught snippets of him trying to create a pecking order. I brought him in and immediately laid into him for five minutes and left for a minute or two. Went back in and did it for ten, and at the end he just started talking. Hasn’t shut up for the last ten minutes I’ve been in here. But this type of tactic only works on a small section of subjects.”
“Mm.” I acknowledge. “Are the pauses to let them second guess themselves?”
“Not with him, but that is a use for it. For a novice interrogator, it’s more difficult to identify who it will be effective on, but as your reads on people get more accurate, and your toolkit expands, that’s when you can really shine.
“This prat thought he was clever and tough, where in my experience people who think they are both are rarely either. The pauses are for him to feel failure through no fault of his own. Helpless people want to grasp at any hope they are given. If he was a difficult target, I would think of using you as a first responder or a scientist or something to go in there and tend to his wounds and ask questions, but I won’t need to do that for this session. He’s practically begging to answer my questions.”
He gets up, rolls his shoulders and shakes out his hands. “There are some bars in the drawer and coffee in the machine if you want.” I nod and express my thanks while moving to take advantage of the offer.
I chew on the bar and sip the tar-flavored caffeine drink and watch Marks saunter into the room. He slaps the boy to get him to focus and buries his knuckles in his stomach when he won’t stop rambling. He then gets three very personal questions answered including who his parents were and details of his status screen. Marks shakes his head in disgust, frees his arms and legs and dumps him outside the room and storms back into the office with a flare in his nostrils.
“How did a basic [Brawler] make it into this program?! He barely has the required skills and many are still rated low beginner.”
“Is everyone here initialized but me?”
“Yes. Only a handful have Tracks, but they should get one before they finish the program.”
And my worries are realized. Everyone here is older than me. “I guess I’m a little surprised no one from my class was selected?”
“Ahh, yeah. This is the first year that protegees were chosen based on more than intuition. From what I can tell there were fewer sponsorships this time around, so fewer young candidates would result. Just a theory mind you.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Of course, I appreciate the info all the same. It was weird to lay into someone that was clearly older than me though.”
“That, you will get used to. Scumbags come in all ages. Men and Women scumbag in different ways, but that’s a class for later in the course.”
Silence permeates through the office as he gets a coffee to sip. I notice that the room has blood on the floor and tape still attached to the chair. “You want me to clean this one up while you prep others?”
“I’d appreciate it, the supplies are in the corner there.” I nod and watch him pick up a roll of duct tape as he leaves.
Cleaning was a routine set of actions that don’t take much thought, so I enjoyed the mental break while I worked on getting the blood off the floor. The smell of the cleaning chemicals lingers, even when Jerrico comes back with another recruit, the scent is noticeable.
He comes out to talk with me and asks if I want this one as he asked about me and if I’d be interrogating him—seemed afraid of it, even. I told him I would give it a shot.
When I walked into the room, the boy’s eyes widened further than surprise.
“He said it wouldn’t be you, he said!”
“Instructor Jerrico lied.” I grin like a cheshire cat. And start playing with him.
The sadistic monster character I played was a little too comfortable, but in the end, I convinced him that I was a vampire that could read surface thoughts through blood, and that I wanted to see if tasting brain matter would give me the answers I wanted. As soon as I put my knife against his scalp he broke and vomited his life story to me. I cut an arm loose after I drag him out of the room and walk into the office after maybe an hour.
“You leaned too hard on him. On the fear I mean. Fear that strong and prolonged can ruin a person’s brain.” Jerrico warned. “Also, another fault I noticed was that, for a few minutes, you were enjoying yourself. It’s okay to enjoy a job well done, but enjoying the process, the torture and torment, leads to a dark place.”
I nod at that and hang my head, having no good response because I realized it too.
“Don’t take it too hard. This is a learning experience for you as well, and this kind of reason is why we don’t usually let trainees interrogate. Then again, I made the mistake of not respecting that the boy was afraid of you before you showed up. And to your credit, we don’t really care if you break a scumbag while getting information.”
“I see, so is he going to wash out because of me?” I’m afraid of the answer.
“Yes and no. He would likely not have passed the final, but he’ll probably need therapy before he can be re-employed. The boy that Marks pummeled will probably wash out too, seems to have broken his drive. Doesn’t give me hope for the class though. We usually get three washes in the final alone.”
If that keeps up, it’s a third of the class gone before we get to the field part of field training. Damn. “What happens to them after?”
“We generally re-employ them to another section of the Organization. A ten-year stint lets you walk away free and clear. The price of becoming a specialist, though, is you don’t get to walk away. I got tired of killing folks after five years, re-employed as a trainer. Been here for a decade. I know the timeline’s a bit wonky, but don’t think too much about it.”
This is why we don’t assume, Kimber. I would never have picked Jerrico as an assassin. I think he likes it that way though? Seems to take this seriously, but not in a way that is overly restrictive or taciturn.
I take his advice and put the moral quandaries to the side, “got anything for me after I clean this up?” I gesture at the room.
“Mm. Marks and I have some more sessions to get through the recruits. We’ll have an after action and review your barracks interrogation after dinner’s settled. Say eight-ish.”
I acknowledge the time with a mock salute and clean the interrogation room before heading back to my room to change into my workout gear. A few laps of machinery-free areas has me warmed up and wondering what the gentlemen were using the pads I saw laid out and stacked up for. I see a bunch on the side stacked next to a pillar, when I get an idea. I jog to the office, duck in to grab a roll of duct tape and give Jerrico my most reassuring smile and dart back out.
The pads are only about three centimeters thick, but they do Velcro together on the bottoms and they are flexible enough to wrap around one of the I-beam pillars supporting the warehouse. I strap three lengths together and move the rest of the pads away. With a few pad to steel tape anchors, I start wrapping the pads around the pillar, and five rotations later, I have a nice thick pad that I then put thick bands of tape to the middle, top and bottom.
Excited, I do a few test punches and kicks and decide to go back and get my gloves. I spend at least an hour doing routines on the makeshift heavy-bag and getting rid of my exercise jones. When I turn around to see Marks and Jerrico studying me? My hand was on my knife holster and I had almost drawn when I realized it wasn’t creepers.
“Why didn’t we think of this years ago?” Marks asks.
“She’s fifteen, energy oozing out of her pores. I was worried what she had planned with the roll of tape she made off with.”
“Not the knives she walks around with? It was the tape that had you worried?” Marks shakes his head. “Lets go get dinner and let the kid clean up.”
I chuckle as they walk away, and I swear one asks the other if I shower with the knives too. I’m certainly taking them with me to the stall in case some pervert wants to die today. I doubt it’ll be an issue though it doesn’t feel as though the people I interrogated would be up for revenge.
The shower is a glorified overhead water bucket with a pull chain. I haven’t taken a shower so cold in a year, but it kind of reminds me of a simpler time, when all I had to worry about was food and petty revenges. Now people are trying to kill me, I have a family I want to save, and the upcoming initialization hanging over my head. Time to do dinner and look at the after action.
I pull on track pants and a sleeveless hoodie and go to get my meal box.
“Alright, let’s see what the lottery has for me today? Open the box.”
“Hmm, oh! It’s still sizzling! Chicken fajitas with sides, a steak with fries, a side salad and half a cheesecake.” I look down and see the glorious bounty and think that with the cheesecake this is way over the calories I have left for the day. “Huh, my calorie allotment for the day must have glitched, this alone would be 3k.”
“Don’t care, gimme that cheesecake.” He starts reaching and I slap his hand.
“This is a trade, good instructor Jerrico. Show me the snacks or the cheesecake gets it.”
He reaches down and sets down four packs of pretzels and six sleeves of almonds. He gestures like it’s some grand reveal.
“Can you believe this Marks?”
“I can’t believe you’re robbing a kid.”
“Stealing cheesecake from a baby, the travesty.” I smile and chuckle at the discomfort in Jerrico’s body language. I hand over the covered delight and rake in my snacks. “Ooh! Smoked and salted almonds. Nice.”
Marks groans, I assume he’s jealous of the dessert. “Look gents, sweets aren’t my favorites. I crash way too hard. I’ll let you decide who gets what, but if the calorie mix-up happens again, I may just donate to the foundation of sweets deprived Instructors.”
“A noble charity.” Both instructors agree as Jerrico passes over a sliver of the creamy-looking treat to Marks.
I tuck into my meal box and my mouth is nearly overwhelmed by the richness of the steak and the fiesta of the fajitas. I don’t get to be full often, but to my shame, I have to share my fries with the guys to finish my meal. In my defense this one was two full meals.
The instructors invite me into Marks’ room and tell me to link my phone to the TV and tap the link they sent me. I do as instructed and my interrogation of Jamie pops on screen.
“As a preface, Jerrico saw your other interrogation. We talked about it while you were cleaning up. Will discuss both after.” I nod and he taps play on my phone. The sound clarity is only okay, so we stop and rewind a few times.
“It looked like you were about to stop before the . . . chest punches.”
“I was, I had gotten two pieces, but if it weren’t a recruit, would I hesitate to try the most painful option? I would have felt that I’d left something in there, so I leaned on her for ten more minutes and she caved.”
“I liked the food baiting. I disliked the phone usage.” Marks critiques. I knew that would come up.
“I liked the slap, disarming, makes the consequences more real. I dislike that you didn’t reward her during the game. If you’re making the consequences real, the rewards must seem real too.” Solid point, especially with food.
“That seems like solid feedback, and your thoughts on my going too far with the previous recruit will be taken to heart. My excuse for the phone is I thought she was taunting me with my friend Jamie’s name, so I checked the recruit listing to mitigate my anger. A weakness sure, but I had a reason I felt was important.”
“Still, if you need to do something like that, work it into the plan, instead of just doing it and scrambling after. That said, it was a good interrogation. You were in control the whole time, and you kept the whole picture in mind.”
“With all that in mind, what do you feel about how Jamie and Carter performed?” Marks asks.
“Jamie did great. She saw an opportunity to get to know more about me once she thought I was not fully present with the phone. When she lost control of the exchange, she tried to change tacks which almost worked. I don’t have the skill to have gotten any more out of her, the pain looked like she was going to black out soon.
“Carter. Well, I agree with Jericco in that I shouldn’t have proceeded with him at all. I played into his fears and took it too far instead of easing off and putting in harder, but more sensible work. And if I go back to Joseph, I think he has the ability to do better, but I don’t think he took it seriously when I walked in and that started him far behind.”
“Okay, okay, ‘instructor’ Novarro. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but ease up. The next week, we shouldn’t have any other sessions for you to do as the washouts leave us six a piece and we can do that if you help us clean after each session.” He uses his big instructor voice and everything.
“I am here to help until it’s time for me to get back in line.” I hold my hands up in surrender.
“She doesn’t understand who her mentor is, does she?”
“Look, Novarro, we really appreciate the help and it’s not your fault this whole training cycle went tits up when the Lieutenants got involved. That said, it’s messed up that you have to do this at all. With your, anger management, I’m surprised you can work with us.”
“Gents, I honestly feel better that these recruits have initialized. I’m with the Empress in thinking that I can make rational, informed decisions at my age. I don’t have as much information as an 18 year-old would have, but that’s what I believe parents and mentors are for—helping inform us to make the best decisions. Would I normally condone adults laying into teens? No, but the fact that you care enough to chastise me about my excesses, and that you are only teaching folks that have trained and chosen to come here, it feels less skeevy.”
“Huh, you’re more mature than most adults I know. Then again, you had to be didn’t you?” Marks analyses me with a critical eye, as though he’s seen something different about me.
“Before we devolve into how great we think we all are, Marks and I have been discussing your training. We want you to stick around until just before Mr. Strum arrives, and then we’re sending you to a team to handle the rest of your training.”
“Did I do something wrong?” After being appreciated, news of being sent away is a punch in the gut.
“No, Novarro, you would have passed all of these interrogations, and it would be a disservice to you, and possibly a good beating for us, if you don’t get field interrogations before you move to the tactics team.”
“And with Miss Fontaine warning us against Mister Strum, we’re tempted to move you to the field unit early.”
“Do you two practice the whole tandem talking thing?” I smile at the ridiculousness of these two and appreciate their confidence in me.
“Years of working together. We spend so much time doing the job, that we’re used to each other.” Marks says.
“I don’t recommend it.” Jerrico teases and gets a punch in the arm for it.
“You guys are adorable. And thanks? Since people are already mad at me, and I get special treatment because of my mentor, may as well keep riding the wave.”