10.1 Callum's breakfast
Reserve Companies sit outside on the dirt, happily chatting away, basking in the Eastern sun as they clutch their trays under their mouths. Unlike them, the leader-absent Ocean Company eats in silence. They’ve hardly spoken since they woke up.
Callum eyes their teammate Gunner, who’s picking at his broccoli. He’s a good guy, Gunner, but he’s brash. He acts before he thinks. Out here, brashness could get you killed.
Thing is, Callum’s tired of getting mad. It’s his crutch. When you use a crutch over and over again for years, you feel useless without it. Callum’s not like that anymore. He drops his spork on his tray.
“Hey. Let’s forget about last night, yeah? We don’t want this hanging over us,” he says.
Gunner responds with an indignant, “No.”
Already, that’s pissed him off. He narrows his eyes. “You wanna try that again?”
Gunner chews his eggs and swallows. “We’ll let the leader handle it,” he tells them, pointing his spork at the empty space next to Forrest.
Forrest asks, “Why?”
“I want to see what she does,” says Gunner. “I mean—look at her.”
Almost involuntarily, Ocean turns to look at the cafeteria tent. Riel is standing behind the buffet servers, scooping potatoes and trading a few unsmiling words with the blond cafeteria girl. The scene isn’t abnormal, at face value. Somehow, Callum still knows what he’s getting at.
“But you’re still going to apologise,” Callum says.
Gunner pauses. “Yeeaah,” he says gruffly, scratching his neck. “The car wasn’t stopping. I dunno. I thought he was going to do something.”
“You were scared,” says Forrest. Crumbs are stuck to his hairless chin. It’s surprisingly direct, and not to mention funny. “I wasn’t scared,” says Gunner.
Callum thinks Forrest hit the nail on the head. He hadn’t considered the fact before; Gunner doesn’t seem the type. But it's one plus two. The car got close. There’s an unknown threat in the country. Standing by the sign, Callum’s alarm bells were going off, too.
“It’s okay, Gunner,” says Forrest.
“I wasn’t scared!” he says. Then he pauses, looks at Callum and says, “But I’m sorry man.”
This makes Callum grin with bemusement. “Hey, just don’t be an idiot next time.”
“I won’t.”
“Maeven’s coming,” Forrest says, fur ears perking up. Win puts his sketchbook down and finally starts to eat.
Gunner leans towards him and whispers, “Watch this.”
As Riel walks over to them, yawning and lifting her apron over her head, Gunner tosses his tray on the empty spot they reserved just for their leader.
Callum and Gunner watch her, waiting. He doesn’t really know for what, exactly. Maybe for a vein to stick out on her temple, or a timid, “Hey.” Instead, Maeven calmly stacks her tray on top before sitting down to eat. His blonde teammate frowns, gesturing perplexedly at the sight, then at Callum. Riel is too focused on her food to notice.
“Hey, did you hear?”
Someone’s crouched in beside them. It’s Victor, handsome guy from Sky Company. “We’re leaving Rosca, moving to a bigger city,” he tells them.
“Already?” says Callum,
“Yeah. Apparently they don’t need our help down here. Oh, and Riel, Eyeshot wants you to do inventory before we leave.”
Riel acknowledges it with a look.
“We’re leaving in an hour so…that means now. Sorry bud.”
So their leader takes her moment, before picking up her trays and opening her hand at Gunner.
“What?” Gunner says.
“Your spork.”
Gunner raises an eyebrow. He places his utensil and napkin gingerly in Riel’s hand. She closes her fingers around it, gets up, and discards Gunner’s tray and utensils in the trash bag as she makes for the bus.
10.2 Stocktake
----------------------------------------
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty…
Everyone has Will. In non-Users, it’s subtler and it resides more deeply within them. If Maeven strains hard enough, she can sense it.
Gunner’s Will is hard and immovable. Callum’s is pained but tempered. And if they were still angry, a minute ago she might have also sensed that uncomfortable weight of contempt, but she didn’t. Has her Intuition faltered so bad since her Will Block? Or have they already gotten over it?
Gradually, her counting slows, before stopping completely. She rests her hands on the smoke grenade box, thinking. There’s something odd about what she just felt, and she doesn’t know what to think of it.
“Need help?”
Victor’s entered the field bus storage, fresh-faced as if he didn’t sleep on the ground last night, like they all did.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“No thanks,” she says, resuming. “Where’s Sky Company?”
For some reason, the leader walks to the flare boxes behind her and starts to count anyway. “They’re not far. Actually, the Captains don’t seem to mind if I talk to Ocean or Sand. It’s only when I try to drift to Beach Company or Seagull Company when–well you know–Leichman’s over my shoulder.” He waves a flare. Right. Leichman was the one to order them to stay within their companies in the first place.
“One thousand six hundred,” she murmurs.
“Hm?”
“Nothing.”
Sketchy is filling in the inventory count on a clipboard. She moves to the ammunition boxes, bullets jingling as she lines them together. The bus is uncomfortably stuffy.
“Twelve-hundred,” Victor says. Maeven takes the clipboard from Sketchy and extends it behind her without a glance. He takes it, pencils it in and moves to the rifle reserve next to her.
“I already counted those,” she says. But Victor steps closer.
“Bet you haven’t counted these.” He picks up some of the other ammunition boxes, grinning. “I saw Gunner last night. He seemed upset.”
And what of it? It’s not his company.
“Can I ask what happened?” he requests, like a kind gentleman. “I could talk to him, if you like,” he then says.
“They’re fine.”
“You sure? Because situations like these are good opportunities to teach something about threat response.” He pauses, then hands her the clipboard. “And leadership.”
The Sky leader knows what happened. He probably talked to Gunner last night; he talks to everyone. Sure, he’s a nice guy, but over the weeks at the VR Maeven’s noticed the User’s tendency for…unsolicited help. He hands out water pitchers to the Captain’s table every morning, he asks Maeven if she’s eaten knowing that she has to split leftovers with Holly. She’d like to see how long he can keep this up. It’s exhausting and somewhat inauthentic, treating everyone he meets like his one special person.
And unlike him, Maeven’s not interested in teaching people life lessons. “Like what?”
“Well the reason I say that is because it’ll stick. There’s nothing like learning on the field,” he says, eyes distant. “You’re facing an unknown threat, right? You want to react. You also want to react right. And there’s like—a window of impulse before deciding what you should do. And that window is the difference between a good decision and a bad decision. Of course, there’s only so long you can sit and wait there. That’s why you set the rule, right? Once the car passes the sign, that’s when it should have escalated.”
“Callum’s the one who set the rule,” she says.
“OK. But you enforced it. Why? Because it meant something.”
Maeven nods a little. “It defined a point of distinction.”
“Exactly.” He points at her. “We don’t want to kill them if they don’t deserve to die. But we don’t want to die either. See Riel? That’s why you need to be listened to! You’re a leader. You orient your team,” says Victor. “You gotta tell them that. You know—be confident.”
Maeven’s stopped counting again. She’s staring at the ammunition box.
Victor, Gunner, Howard. It’s like they’re all telling her the same thing.
“I didn’t choose to be leader,” she says.
“You didn’t. You were forced. But duty and desire are different things,” Victor tells her.
Maeven is quiet at that.
10.3 Jurn
----------------------------------------
They arrived in their new city that afternoon, where the council of Jurn has kindly provided the assignees with a community centre, just for the Reserve. Large tents are organised across a wide, wooden floor, harbouring twenty assignees at a time rather than the previous five. There are cubicle showers and a small kitchen, basketballs hoops that hang from the ceiling.
Out of all the sleeping arrangements so far however, Maeven could imagine better.
The cramming of assignees and storage crates does little to warm the spaces at night, and the only semblance of solitude is under the covers of her fold out bunk, which smells of old, dusty tarp.
Maeven signals Victor with a wave of Resonance. He promptly leads the members of Sky and Sand out of the tent to wash up, leaving her alone with Ocean as he had promised. The Sky leader winks at her before walking out and shutting the tent flap, and she continues to wonder just what drives that assignee to do the things that he does. She’s never given him anything, and it’s not like in the short time their campaign lasts it’s going to earn him some sort of promotion.
Maeven turns.
“Ocean Company,” she says, once she’s satisfied that the other companies have walked far enough from the tent. “I guess I don’t…acknowledge it often, but—we are a team.”
They’re semi-circled around her bunk: Forrest is cross-legged on the floor, Callum and Win are sitting on the opposite bed, and Gunner is standing upright, arms folded.
In her head, it like they’re all looming over her.
“Listen.” She shuffles forward and forgoes a moment of eye contact to concentrate. “I remember doing campaigns like this in the Academy. If you know anything about User academies, you’d know that they don’t make it easy for you.” She doesn’t bother clarifying the event she’s trying to address. The elephant in the room. “You try to give them a limit, they’ll only use that information to gauge where to push you from. But anyway, when we started with these campaigns I was—as you are as a kid I was afraid. I’d freeze up. Everything felt like it could kill me. Everything felt like a mistake. But slowly I realised that if one thing was going to keep me away from death, it wouldn’t be inaction, it would be deliberation.”
For once the company returns with nothing but silence.
“Even though they were simulations, you still felt the weight of error, in that in the real world there is no ‘fixing things.’ You are the problem or you are the solution. So why the rules? Why do we set them? We set them with the intention that it forces us to assess ourselves, to do something right as opposed to stupid. We’re human. We all understand that. The moment you let things like fear or hate drive you, the more you risk doing something that is going to get you killed, or someone else killed. That’s why…” She looks at Gunner. “…we respect the rules.”
He's looking back at her.
“And know that I don’t like making them, so, if they’re there I…I’d have thought about it,” Maeven finishes.
Her eyes sweep across the assignees, and in the moment, it feels like a pin drop would make them flinch.
She notices Gunner look down and shift his weight.
“Understand?” says Maeven.
Gunner looks up, his voice lower that she’s used to. “Yeah.”
“If you have time to think about it, think about it.”
“Yeah.”
“And then you do it.”
“I’m sorry Maeven,” he says. He uncrosses his arms and rubs the back of his head. “Sorry everyone. I—” He thinks about it before continuing. “I thought they were going to hurt us.”
The responses come out late. Mumbled and overlapped. “It’s okay man,” from Callum, something like “Me too,” from Forrest.
“Won’t let it happen, Gunner,” she says. “You’re safe.”
Maeven doesn’t know if it’s just her, but she finds herself witnessing a cohesion of attitude, of mood, that’s difficult for her to fathom. All it took was the nerve. To bring them together and start something. She had delayed the talk not because she was afraid they weren’t going to listen. She was afraid they weren’t going to listen to her. And the feeling of her company finally treating something serious for once is an unfamiliar acknowledgement she wonders is okay to take as a compliment.
“Orders are orders,” surmises Win, and when he stands up from the bunk it signals everyone back into motion.
“Fuckhead,” says Callum as the assignee passes by. “Yeah, alright,” Gunner says.
“Don’t go to sleep yet, Win,” demands Maeven, just as the assignee is about to pull the blanket over his shoulder.
Her checklist for the night has one last box left to tick. Something she shouldn’t ignore.
She hadn’t just focused on Callum and Gunner’s Will during breakfast this morning, in fact, there’s no way she could have. There was another Resonance getting in the way, gleaming in peripheral.
Win’s Will.
Something about it stands out, to an extent beyond dormancy like ordinary non-Users. It feels fortified, unyielding, and resonates with a deep, ingrained determination.
They wouldn’t have enough time to achieve what he draws in his sketchbooks, but perhaps Maeven could help him make a start. Besides, it is what Howard told her to do, to help.
“Come with me. Captain Eyeshot asked me to do a patrol tonight.”