25.1 Pill Bug
It was the size of her fingertip. Everyone called them ‘rollie pollies’ at the academy. They were little black beetles that curled into a ball like an armadillo. This afternoon, Maeven found one by the courtyard, beaded up in a strip of gravel that neighboured a sandstone pathway on her way to the library. She bent down just to watch it, curious to see what it looked like when it unfurled.
LAROSA ACADEMY
YEAR THREE
“Coast is clear,” she whispered to it.
She hoped it would encourage the little guy out of his shell, instead, it stayed curled up and still like an object. The creature was convinced that there was a threat about, it seemed. This was confusing to Maeven, because all that surrounded it were tiny, harmless rocks.
Maeven cupped her hands and circled the bug with the sides of her palms, walling the creature. Surely by now it would realise that there was nothing to be afraid of. She was on her way to finish her reading materials in the library, so they didn’t have all the time in the world to wait. After a few seconds of nothing had gone by, she went on to believe, this bug is completely oblivious.
She’d just have to pull it open herself. At least if it could get a little peak of the outside world, the creature would realise it was safe. She picked it up and pinched it in both hands. Closing one eye to get a proper look, she started to tug.
“Now what did the little fella ever do to you?”
Maeven jumped.
A teacher crept up behind her, a teacher whom she recognised. She was short, and she had a growth on her nose and crooked teeth. The Larosa girls whispered about her. Since nobody in her grade really knew who she was—she only taught the older kids at the faculty—Maeven knew they were only being mean. Talking about her because of the way she looked.
At that moment, Maeven didn’t know how to respond. This wasn’t the first time she’s met the teacher—the lady’s crept up on her a couple times before, asking about what she was doing. Always crept, somehow, Maeven had never seen nor heard her coming.
Maeven put the bug down. She didn’t know what she was doing was bad.
“What is it?” said the teacher. She stepped close and crouched beside her, short heels clicking. “It’s a little pill bug.” She looked at Maeven, a smile on her face. “Now I see, you were trying to help it weren’t you?”
Maeven nodded, feeling glad that the teacher understood.
They looked at the bug together.
“You know, I realised in my years of teaching that there are some things people can be told to do, and some things they just have to learn by themselves.”
Was she telling her to wait? Maeven asked, “Will it come out by itself?”
That’ll probably take forever, she thought.
“I’m sure it will. You know—it’ll get hungry or bored. We all get bored, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh but I hate being patient. I just get too excited. But I learned that if you rush it, you know, you only end up ruining the surprise,” said the teacher as she held out her hand so they could stand up. “Life is filled with so many surprises…” she trailed off. Her eyes turned slowly to Maeven. “Say…that reminds me.”
Suddenly, the teacher dropped to Maeven’s eye level.
“Are you thinking of specialising in Intuition, Maeven?”
Maeven stayed quiet. After all, she had never told the teacher her name.
“Either way, INTUIT1000. In five years I want to see you seated front row in my class, remember this. Otherwise…I’ll be sure to remind you.” Again, the teacher looked away for a moment. “You can call me Mrs Sirett, okay?”
“…Okay,” said Maeven.
“I’ll be watching you!”
It wasn’t creepy at all the way she left it at that and practically skipped away. In fact, it was surprising that she had been noticed by name, by someone from the faculties.
Leaving the bug alone, Maeven continued to the library with her book bag. Although it was still too early to be thinking about Will specialties, she kept a mental note of that course code for when the time came.
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25.2 Running
It’s past midnight. Maeven is standing just outside of Tesset, her uniform sagging from the weight of water bottles, electrolytes and MREs stuffed in her pockets, along with the things Eyeshot lent to her: the bank card and a small square of pad pixels.
She told Ocean Company over dinner that she was going to be gone for a couple of days. They were being served with seasoned minced meat, mashed potatoes and boiled vegetables that Gunner surmised tasted like freezer slosh, when Maeven thought it’d be unwise to divulge on the details of her assignment. She didn’t mention Eyeshot’s suspicion with Mills, nor the possible mismanagement of assignees 500 to 1000. Just a reconnaissance mission on a site up north, that’s all they needed to know for now. If she told them everything then and there, it would likely reach Sky Company’s ears, and then Sand Company’s, and then the entire rest of The Reserve. There’d be a mess of mutated rumours once she comes back having figured out what’s really going on with South Sarafiyah. Not worth the cleanup.
She looks out to the night ahead, stretching her hamstrings by pulling the arch of her boots. She’ll run for a bit, she’s decided, then catch a ride when she tires out. It shouldn’t take more than a day. Highway 12, just left of Tesset, climbs up all the way to the Oman border. It’ll be her guide for the majority of the trip. Maeven winds her shoulders to get them loose and spaces her feet. Then she considers it for a second.
They only finished the BA mission yesterday, when she woke up dumped in the ocean next to Rich’s sinking ship. Her head still hurts a little from the Will Contract. The reason why she decided to run is because it’d be a good opportunity to exercise her Optimisation, since it weakened after her Will Block.
I’ll take it easy.
With that thought, Maeven Optimises her legs and bursts forward.
She sprints through the barren desert until it’s sunlit, short black hair whipping behind her shoulders as she downs another water bottle and disintegrates it with a flare of smoky Will. The sun is searing but the wind is cool. She can hear an engine humming behind her.
It’s the fourth hitchhike-ready vehicle passing by since she started to consider whether this is enough of a stretch from ‘taking it easy’. All she needs to do is turn and raise her hand to get the driver’s attention. Someone in a truck or a sedan would pick her up eventually. For some reason, she hasn’t done it yet, she keeps her eyes ahead, determined almost for no reason, to keep running to the horizon.
She’s been remembering this subject called OPTI3100 that was all about endurance. Mr Whitter made it mandatory that they join his running club in order to pass the class because he believed that running was the dance of discipline. They weren’t nice runs. They couldn’t look at the birds, they had to look ahead, sometimes sing old-America army songs despite their exhaustion. On the odd morning he’d tell the students that they were temporarily banned from using their Optimisation and then relish in the immediate concord of sighs. He wanted you not to like it. To run for a purpose he believed was greater than enjoyment.
Maeven thought his philosophies might have been better suited to a place like GRIT Academy, a school known for its brutality, but at least she did develop a good stamina from it. And to say that discipline is still the reason why she’s running now, she’s not sure. She wouldn’t even call it ‘running,’ really. It feels more like, ‘not stopping.’
That was something she used to be quite good at. To train and never stop.
Back in the academy, all she’d do was improve and study her Will. She understood the concept of letting her body rest, sure, but not really the concept of ‘taking a break,’ and it was an obsession that never seemed to wane. Above friends, above money. A goal of any other direction felt further than upward, angled away of the bullseye. Meaningless.
Where is that feeling now?
It might be her first acknowledgement in months of that thing that’s lived inside of her. That drive that got her to the top of the Honour Roll, though getting there was never her intention to begin with. She remembers Grayman Adcut of the Larona cohort making it to valedictorian at the end of their ceremony. Mrs Sirett, her INTUIT professor, confessed to her that Maeven had apparently been in close consideration for the title after the event concluded, their graduation caps no longer adorned.
It was a good choice that they chose Grayman instead. There’s no way she could have stood on that podium and given a speech. What would there be to say? Oh, really? Thanks. She’d stand there a few extra seconds before realising she had run out of words, then leave, footsteps echoing and all. She’d just been surprised enough professors had vouched for her in the faculty offices.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
That feeling. It must be still there, somewhere. Hints of it flicker with every ache in her limbs, each stab of ice pricks in her lungs, as she forces her breaths deep and diaphragmatic; as she stares ahead at some impossibly far place, between the sand and the sky, and keeps running.
Only after several hours does Maeven’s run make a slow, weighted stop, boots thudding, arms swinging then hands planting on her knees. She finally calls it. It’s too hard to keep going. She collapses to the sand and for a moment, just sits there and breathes. She focuses Will to her lungs and draws it away from her legs, now that she isn’t using them. A pain unveils in her calves as she does this, and on the sides of her toes and her heels. Who knows how long they’d really been aching for. Her Optimisation was masking it for hours.
Her senses fuzzy, Maeven looks down the road she was following and notices a car approaching. A white tray-back ute with rolls of hay stacked in the trailer. It misses her; Maeven raises her hand a second too late. She glances for any traffic oncoming: nothing, the road is empty, and falls with her back on the sand and flattens her legs.
At least this means she won’t have to move for a while.
Midday sunlight feels scorching against her face. A few minutes of laying idle and she rolls her head to look for some shade. The only thing of proximity is a small sand mound a few metres from the road, enough to get some cover over her face, so she repositions there and closes her eyes.
Almost immediately, Maeven passes out asleep. Dead still. Not even the roar of diesel engines loud enough to break her slumber. It was just like after they returned ashore from defeating Rich. Not long after climbing into Ocean’s Humvee, she fell asleep as sudden as a light flicking off.
What shocks her awake many hours later, is a flare of her own smoky Will. Maeven jolts up on her elbow, heart beating, sweat pooling, expecting a threat at her throat. Alas, all she sees after her eyes rip open is a road barely visible in the dark. She slept for so long the sun’s down.
You idiot.
It was the same kind of unconscious, inherent Intuition Will that listens out for sounds in the night. Users are relatively safe sleeping alone and out in the open, in the sense that your Will is also your 24/7 security system; it never really stops watching out for your wellbeing.
In this scenario, her Will seemed to know that Maeven only has so much time she can spend passed out before Eyeshot calls asking why she hasn’t arrived at South Sarafiyah yet. Essentially, it autonomously resorted to the ice bucket.
Maeven pushes herself up.
That nap was disgusting.
She calls her Will and gives her head a quick shake. It removes the muddy, otherworldly inebriation of a terrible nap.
She’s in luck. There’s another car driving towards her from the distance, and this time she waves her hand at the vehicle before its headlights can shine over her. She limps her arm once she can tell that it’s slowing down. The old, green sedan stops in front of her with the window to the driver’s seat down. Sitting inside is a bearded man, asking her a question in Mortaresi.
Not knowing what he’s saying, Maeven doesn’t answer.
He asks another question. This time she catches on to the word, ‘Army’ spoken in English, the sentence intoned like a question.
“Reserve,” she says.
He gets out and opens the passenger door. Maeven climbs in.
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25.3 Village
The man’s name is Majid. He introduced himself a few minutes into the night drive. “Maeven,” she returned shortly after that, before he continued to speak in his native tongue.
Without Forrest around, she can only get an idea of what he’s saying. Something to do with where he’s driving, since he was gesturing out to the sand road, palm curving to the right. Now, he’s delving into something so passioned she assumes it’s political, because it reminds her of her dad whenever he talks about the United Lands. We should be doing this instead of that. This person should be in charge instead of that person. It’s curious that the man keeps talking knowing Maeven doesn’t speak the language, but she supposes that the emotions translate. The pride, the frustration.
Maeven just watches the back of his head, nodding occasionally. It’s hard to shake off that culture that Larosa Academy instilled in her, it seems. Be polite and keep your manners with you. She listens as best she can, assuming a man who’s enjoying the company, who wants to express the passion he has for his country. Or something. She makes sure to keep her Optimisation Will active, so it can prevent her from falling asleep.
But she must leave him at some point.
Almost an hour passes when the man, wrung out of topics to speak about, decelerates and turns to the north-east, off-roading. Maeven takes her head off the headrest as there’s a dip in the terrain and the sedan sways. In order to stay en route, she can’t divert too far from the main highway, so she looks at what’s ahead of them, headlights illuminating some dark cluster as Majid turns.
They’re driving towards a small village. Maeven can see brown rectangular huts as the lights rear over them; it’s only a few minutes’ distance from the road. There’s a wooden-fenced paddock, maybe for sheep, and a seemingly random placement of mud brick walls spread throughout the streets, parts of them crumbling out of form and merging with the sand. They’re blemishes you’d probably get used to after living in the same place for long enough. This village must have sustained for easily over a hundred years, nowadays in mild disrepair.
Majid pulls into one of the huts and opens his door. Maeven gets out with him, then casts her eyes around. She can hear the cluck of a single chicken, a soft hum on the highway. As Majid picks up some plastic bags from his car and takes them to his door, she hears him calling out a name.
“Shukran,” Maeven says to him, meaning thank you. She made good cover towards Sarafiyah because of his help. She’ll have the chicken pot pie shoved in her pants pocket for dinner (better to have the worst one first), find a place to sleep for just an extra hour or two, then reach her AO as soon as she can. She walks away from Majid’s car, turning around so she can wave goodbye.
A warm light spills over the sand from his front door. Someone else has opened it, Majid’s wife, looks like, wearing a blue thobe and a headscarf. Maeven catches on to the word, “Reserve,” as Majid speaks to the woman. Then he glances at his car, realises Maeven is no longer standing by it, since she’s already partly walked away.
They meet eyes.
“No, no, no,” Maeven says.
The couple are stepping apart to both sides of their front door, flanking their orange-lit abode as they waft their arms towards the light. They want me to come in. That sounds like a situation she won’t know how to excuse herself from, and more lectures from Majid.
“I’m okay, thank you. Shukran,” she says.
The response only makes them brighten. The couple stay parted by their door, smiling and waiting for her to make the awaited movement.
They took the thank you as a, “Yes thank you,” didn’t they?
Just a couple hours then, she tells herself, not willing to make them feel abandoned.
She enters the hut. Upon stepping inside she’s embraced by the hug of a warm cooking fire; along with the savoury scent of meat, spice and a hint of something akin to liquorice. Majid invites her to sit, where next to the door, there’s a corner of two-seater couches surrounding a woven brown carpet.
She takes off her shoes—she guessed she should do so by the collection of footwear left by the entrance—and sits down breathing in the delightful smell of fresh food.
In front of her is the kitchen, slightly elevated on a platform of mud brick. Majid’s wife is cooking something on a flat pan over a log-fuelled fire. Maeven watches her curiously.
This might be as traditional as it gets.
There are many objects she barely recognises. Clay flasks hanging on ropes under the ceiling, woven baskets and funnels. She fixates on them for a while, seeing if the woman might reach for something and give some sort of indication of what it’s for. There are also a lot of things she does recognise, metal pots and pans, lightbulbs on a wooden-slab ceiling, side tables, potato sacks, a fridge and bottles of labelled vegetable oil. It isn’t alien, but novel. A glimpse at a different normal.
Majid walks over with a steaming mug and a small handful of dates. The feeling of thirst reaches Maeven as she accepts them. It also reminds her of what she had been up to before she climbed in the man’s car, that’s right. And the aches and the pains in her quads and her calves.
I ran for hours. I just didn’t feel like stopping.
A fact easier to swallow had she merely sustained a light jog for its entirety, only she didn’t.
She sips the drink.
I didn’t know my Optimisation could even handle something like that anymore.
There’s coffee in the mug. The taste is mellowed and fragrant. Some sort of spice has been mixed in, reminding her of chai. The dates; sweet and chewy. The couch; comfortable. Even with all this, she still feels tense. She kind of wants to toss the dates in her mouth all at once, then finish the coffee in heaping gulps so she can leave quicker, because it feels wrong sitting still in the middle of a mission.
Instead of that, she leans on the backrest.
After all, she’d been in the driver’s seat for so very long. The BA mission and specifically, the effects of being a Contract Enforcer are still taking their toll, not to mention the run. She’s more at risk of pushing herself too hard than failing her assignment at this point. So she tries to comfort herself with a couple thoughts: she still has ample time to reach her AO, and it’d be worth it to feel in control of her own tempo.
So she eats her dates, withdraws some of her Optimisation to savour the muscle aches, and watches the woman cook as her body painfully unwinds. She’s slapping dough on a flat pan and scraping off the thin layer that sticks itself to the metal with a spatula, resulting in something that reminds her of crepes.
There’s something calming about it all. Cooking food, Maeven begins to suppose, is one of the most self-evident activities one can partake in. It needs no justification. Everyone has to eat. There’s not a sign of worry in the woman’s eyes about burning things or the mess she’ll have to clean up afterwards, or the assumed danger of her country people. She’s probably not even thinking about the observation that she’s cooking. Unlike Maeven, who appears to question every minute she isn’t running for her life. As Maeven takes a breath of coffee beans, she meditates on the thought.
Dinner is served over a mat on the carpet. The main meal: a saucy meat dish poured over a bed of basmati rice. There’s a pile of flat bread that the woman had made with the dough, as well as some raw red onion and cucumber salad.
They eat with their hands. She watches Majid and his wife mix the rice with a portion of sauce and meat, then ball it up and push it into their mouths with a sort of—forward motion of their thumb. After a few tries Maeven gets a handle of it, and when she chews, she relishes in the tenderness, the rich, oily flavours, the perfect portion with every bite.
Majid’s wife motions for her to try the salad, to eat it consecutively after each bite of the main dish. When Maeven does so, she gets why. It cuts the greasiness of the meat and refreshes the palette with a dose of acidity.
Delicious.
She doesn’t even mind when Majid starts lecturing again. Besides, it’s a small price to pay for a fresh meal. He faces his wife and points at Maeven as if he’s explaining something about her, or more likely, about the Reserve in general. Then turning to Maeven, he asks something that sounds equivalent to, “Isn’t that right?” Maeven hums and nods her head, only because it seems appropriate.
The wife seems reassured. There’s a weight to the woman’s face that makes Maeven think she is worrying about something after all. She speculates that it has to do with the reason why the Reserve was called here, then realises that she should have brought a care package from their supply in Tesset.
She isn’t sure how she can help them right now.
When their meals are finished, Majid shows her a small room opposite their front door. Inside and in the far corner, there’s a single mattress atop a woven mat, as well as a small shelf spilling with old books and newspapers. It’s better than the mud brick wall she had considered as a pillow a couple hours ago, and visiting their abode made her come to terms with the fact that she needs a proper rest. She accepts it without protest.
Closing the door, she removes her jacket and belt and empties her pockets before lying on the mattress.
I should have brought a care package.
That dinner tasted Michelin after weeks of sloppy eggs and MREs. Maeven can’t think of a single thing to give Majid and his wife in return. That is until upon closing her eyes, she gets an idea.
“Hey, Sketchy.”