Kayla followed nearly two hundred recruits as they were ushered into a large gymnasium, arranged into ranks, and told to sit down on the floor. The Induction staff warned them not to talk amongst themselves, and that they were to wait for further instructions. Many of Kayla’s fellow recruits wore nervous expressions or fidgeted as the time passed. The supervisors seemed to have disappeared, though a woman occasionally passed through the hall and cautioned the girls to stop talking. They waited and waited, and though Kayla couldn’t see a clock, she sensed that more than an hour had passed by.
She was beginning to feel like cattle for some kind of horrifying ranch. The induction process had already taken a week, and involved so many medical and psychological tests she wondered why they needed her anymore. With all the personal data the doctors had gathered, she joked to Thandi, they could probably manufacture perfect clones of the recruits.
Her hair had been cut to shoulder length, and she’d been subjected to a physical examination, requiring bloodwork, and a full body scan. This was followed by an interview with a doctor, who asked Kayla questions about her family history, state of health, what aches and pains bothered her, or if she had ever experienced a serious injury. Then came the psychological tests, and a barrage of personal questions about sexual activity, drug, and alcohol use. The Induction staff played gruesome films of animals being slaughtered, while a scanner monitored Kayla’s parasympathetic responses. The machine concluded that she was not a psychopath, and a doctor attributed her relaxed response to her background in a farming community.
Kayla received this information with pride. She always suspected that her Helvet classmates had been weak-minded, sheltered people, and now it had been scientifically proven.
Next came the basic fitness tests. Kayla ran on treadmills, performed jumping jacks, pushups and sit-ups, or breathed into tubes to measure lung capacity. She passed all of them without difficulty and was impatient to get to the next phase. But now they had been marched into this auditorium with no explanation. The induction doctors were confident of the recruit’s physical health—what more did they need to know?
“What’s happening?” a girl seated in front of Kayla said to herself.
“This is stupid,” someone else nearby said. “We’ve been waiting at least a couple of hours already.”
Kayla took a deep breath and remembered that she would never quit. “It doesn’t matter,” she said to the inquisitive girl. “Just wait.”
“No talking please.” A supervisor’s voice rang out through the hall as she walked past.
In front of Kayla, the girl bounced her knees as she shook her head. “I don’t like this, it’s stupid. They’re just messing with us.” She looked around a few times, sighed, then got to her feet and walked over to the nearby supervisor. “I’m done. I want to withdraw,” she said.
The woman directed the recruit to a doorway at the back of the hall without comment. More girls stood up and queued in front of the supervisor to announce their desire to leave. Kayla shrugged her shoulders, slowed her breathing, and daydreamed about the cool things she would get to do once she was a Valkyrie. She would probably be a sniper in whatever unit Urtiga was part of, dispatching death to the monsters on Caldera.
After another hour passed with no more recruits asking to leave, the supervisors returned. They began to call girls by name, who came forward and were led out of the hall through a different door. A short time later, one of those girls reappeared, red faced and crying, and a woman directed her to the exit. This happened several times, and a few more recruits in the hall stood up, found a supervisor, and asked to leave.
Kayla watched the distraught figure walk out. What kind of interview could be so terrible? How would she react when her turn came? She focused on her breathing, and resolved to ignore the countless awful scenarios her imagination was presenting. What if they found a fatal disease, or a genetic defect? Had they gathered secret files on her misbehavior at Madam Georgia’s?
“Kayla Barnes,” a voice called. Kayla struggled to stand on legs grown numb from hours of sitting on the gym’s wooden floor. She followed a woman through a corridor to an office, and sat at a desk. Across from her, a white-coated woman made several notes on a form. Kayla waited as though a sword hung over her head.
After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, the woman turned to her without smiling. “I’m just going to give you a thought experiment to test your problem-solving aptitude. All you have to do is respond to my questions as best you can. Are you ready?”
Kayla nodded. There was no test she couldn’t pass. “Yes.”
“You find yourself washed ashore on a desert island,” the woman said. “On the beach, you can see a box from your shipwrecked yacht, which you open to find a flare, a survival blanket, a knife, a flashlight, and a whistle. What do you do next?”
Kayla thought quickly. “I would search the island for a fresh water source, and once I found it, I’d set up shelter. I’d use the knife to cut branches into sticks and prop up the blanket as a windbreak.”
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The woman’s expression remained stony. “You’re feeling hungry after your efforts. How will you find food?”
“At first, I’d search for edible fruits or nuts, but later I’d want to set up a trap for meat. I’d twist plant fibers together to make the snare, then I’d tie the knife onto a stick, and use it to spear fish.”
“It’s getting late in the day, and the temperature is falling.”
“I make a fire and try to insulate my shelter with dead grass and leaves.” Kayla grew excited as the answers came more easily. Her farming knowledge probably gave her an advantage over city-born recruits, so she would surely impress her interviewer. “When I trap an animal,” Kayla continued, “I conserve its tendons to make stronger chords.”
The game went on, and the interviewer presented her with challenges and setbacks. Her shelter was blown over in a storm, and when she tried to rebuild it, she was attacked by a wild animal. Though she drove the beast off, she broke her spear. Then she lost her food stockpile to seabirds. Kayla’s heart began to race. The scenario was becoming deliberately unfair.
“A rainstorm passes during the night. You can no longer burn the damp wood.” Her interviewer said, a note of disappointment in her voice.
“I’d try and skin the animals I caught to make better clothing.”
“You disposed of those carcasses,” the woman snapped. Then her tone became condescending. “You should probably have thought about that earlier.”
Kayla felt her cheeks flush with heat. Her interviewer was obviously cheating and was looking at her now with narrow eyes and a hint of a smirk. Kayla inhaled slowly. Her reactions were almost certainly part of the test.
She focused on controlling her breathing while the interviewer presented more absurd challenges. Kayla responded as rationally as she could until her starving, emaciated and dehydrated corpse collapsed from exhaustion, to be eaten by scavengers.
The interviewer sighed in exasperation and aggressively crossed something out on her form. “That will be all.”
Kayla left the office buzzing with anxiety. Had she just failed the test? Would she be kicked out? A supervisor wordlessly directed her to a new seating area, where she found Christie looking bored.
“They’re going to throw me out—I did so badly,” Kayla said as she sat down.
“They’re not throwing anybody out,” Christie said. “They’re trying to see if you quit on your own because you were overwhelmed with stress. What was your scenario?”
Kayla shot her a puzzled look. “Tropical Island.”
“I was in the arctic. I froze to death before the end of the first day. Nobody asked me to leave and I’m not going anywhere.”
A stricken recruit emerged from an interview room, walked up to one of the supervisors and asked to be taken home.
“It’s a dirty trick,” Kayla said.
“No, it isn’t. They didn’t say you should leave—only that you could ask to quit if you wanted. Not their fault if you make undeserved assumptions.”
“Why did you decide to stay, anyway?”
Christie smirked. “Oh, we met such fascinating personalities at the beach; I couldn’t possibly pass on the opportunity to dissect them.”
There was a burst of giggles from the other side of the waiting area as Rose joined a gaggle of her admirers.
Kayla winked at Christie, then walked over to her rival. “Feeling the pressure?” she asked.
Rose laughed. “This is nothing compared to a full dance rehearsal from my old teacher.” She turned to the others and her voice changed to a high-pitched nasal mockery. “Now girls, we’re going to run that routine again until you all decide to stop acting like a bunch of hungover pigeons. Djallen, if your leg isn’t fully extended next time, it’s getting a whack from my cane.”
The coterie giggled again, and Kayla fumed. “So, you’re just going to give up on all that fame and fortune, just like that? Won’t your family be furious?”
Rose scoffed. “Kayla, you are well aware that the Djallen family motto is ‘Empowering Humanity’. I can’t think of a better way to live up to that sentiment than doing my part here. My parents may not understand, and may disagree, but they can’t stop me.”
Kayla scoffed. “Yeah, whatever. But I bet you’ll have second thoughts once you realize what life is like without servants.”
“I suppose you’re simply delighted for the chance to engage in violence, aren’t you?”
“Go to hell, Rose. You know exactly why I’m here,” Kayla said, and stalked away.
She grew hot with anger as sniggers broke out behind her. A bunch of petty children laughing at her father’s death. A little casual violence wouldn’t be so bad, would it? But she couldn’t be so stupid in the middle of the induction process—that would only get her kicked out.
Kayla slowed her breathing again and tried to picture the look on Rose’s face if she decided to drop out after only a week.
She returned to Christie, where a stony-faced Thandi had seated herself several chairs away and was refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
“When I ran out of food, I explained that I would pray to help me maintain focus and morale,” she admitted sourly. “That bi—forgive me, that woman—had the nerve to laugh at me, then spent the rest of the interview calling me ignorant.”
After the interviews were finished, the recruits were put on buses and driven into the rough mountains of Tyr. The journey took hours, and while Kayla exchanged a few encouraging words with Thandi, they didn’t talk more. They were all nervous, no doubt worrying about what was in store for them.
Nothing I can’t handle, Kayla reminded herself.
Eventually, the transports arrived at a coastline bordered by lower, gentler peaks and passed through the gates of the Camp White Basic Training Center.
Four hundred young women had travelled to Tyr for the weekend tour, but now only one hundred and fifty dismounted from the buses. Kayla followed a line of recruits towards a large square bordered by wooden cabins. There was no technology visible that was more complicated than a lightbulb. At the edge of the square, a bronze statue of a horse was frozen in the act of climbing a slope. The animal’s carved features seemed to portray an air of intense concentration.
Next to the statue stood a dozen women wearing gray shorts and T-shirts stenciled with the word Instructor in large, black letters. Their cold expressions indicated they were not impressed by the gaggle of teenagers that had been dropped into their training camp. Some recruits stared longingly at the buses as they drove away.