Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) (16 page)

Western Mountains

Underground Training Facility

Once everyone is assembled for breakfast at their assigned team rally points, without giving the team members an opportunity to introduce themselves, the guards dim the lights, and a screen descends from the ceiling above the stage. The small flurries of conversation that had started as people were attempting to learn more about their new teammates are quickly squashed by the roaming guards and their batons. The entire meal is spent in the dark as a rousing martial sales pitch for their new organization blares away in the background. Like everyone else, William is unconcerned with the film reel, only feigning interest when he feels the guards walking nearby. He spends the meal automatically shoveling food into his mouth while flipping through the files on the people seated around him.

He finishes the food on his plate, absentmindedly using a piece of toast to scrape up the few remaining morsels. Next, he completes his scan through the folder of biographies in front of him. Each file tells him one hundred different facts about the people sitting next to him, but none of the files offer him much insight into who they actually are. He figures that this is what he is about to find out, at least once this stupid video stops playing.

Eventually the film winds down, and the hall is cast into complete darkness. Before anyone’s eyes can adjust from the glare of the film to the blackness, the lights are switched on, and everyone is momentarily blinded. Their blindness allows a guard in an officer’s uniform to walk to the podium on the stage without being noticed. He pulls a stack of note cards from his jacket, shuffling them before starting to speak.

“Brave volunteers, today you begin, in earnest, the most important, the most valuable, and, may I say, the most patriotic series of tasks in your life.” The guard’s words are stirring, yet his delivery is lacking the supporting emotion. “Today, young men and women, you begin the quest to return glory to our great nation. Today, you plant the seeds of fear in the hearts of all who have threatened our security. Today, you take the first steps towards becoming heroes.”

Feeling obligated to be polite, almost half of the people in the hall clap. But it soon becomes clear that the speaker was only pausing to shuffle his note cards, and with a stern look and a clearing of his throat, the applause evaporates.

“One day,” he continues, “your names will be remembered for opening a new frontier, for enabling the investments that shall lead not only to a financial revival, but to a moral and spiritual one as well. Your sacrifice will enable the bold leaders of this country to drive it towards greatness. It may be one small step for you to begin this journey, but it is one great leap for our people. Now, form up in your teams and prepare for your morning exercises.”

The speech is clearly over, but the halfhearted paraphrasing of the famous quote was not what the audience needed for motivation. Their applause is even more lackluster than before, as they stand by their tables, awaiting further commands. The double doors beside the stage open, and out swaggers another officer. This one carries a small whip, and when he speaks, there is no need for amplification. Everyone in the hall can hear him just fine.

“All right, teams, form up and move out!” he bellows before turning smartly on his heal and marching back through the door from which he had entered. Nobody moves until guards start herding the teams closest to the doors into the hallway beyond. Once the first couple of teams make it through the door, the rest of the room catches on, and, like a human avalanche, everyone starts moving towards the exit.

William, standing the farthest from the exit, is effectively at the rear of his team. He watches as two of them exchange glances. A tall blonde nervously tugs at the sleeves of her top as she turns her head to look at the small brunette across the table from her. William can see that she has sucked in one corner of her lip and is chewing on it. The brunette looks like the kind of person who is always smiling, but right now, her face is serious, a slight squint to her eyes from concentration marring her otherwise smooth complexion. She shrugs at the blonde, as if to say, “I don’t know, but what choice do we have?”

At the far end of the table are two guys. One has a star embroidered on his shoulder, marking him as an outstanding performer amongst the ranks of conscripts. In practice, it serves to distinguish those who have played the overseer’s game well enough to earn the trust of the guards. As for the other guy—he is a hulking mass, both in height and brawn. If he had chosen to turn around and face the rest of the table, he would have needed to look down in order to see any of the others. William’s gaze strikes him in the middle of his broad, muscled back that seems to strain at the shirt he wears as he takes the first steps towards the exit. According to his file, he’d been playing for some semi-professional team before being “recruited” to their cause, and while William may have never heard of Jackson Flannigan of the Bay City Tigers, he figures he ought to get to know Rick, as he is called now, his team’s hardware specialist. The rest of the team has to half jog to catch up with his long strides as he joins the flood towards the doors.

Once they reach the door, the press of people slows down their group’s progress, and they fall into a line to squeeze through the bottle neck. As the crowd presses in on William, he clutches the folder closer to his chest and focuses on not stepping on the heels of the tall blonde in front of him. Once they’ve shuffled through the door, the hall opens up, and the crowd seems to expand, filling its new container. William almost breathes a sigh of relief, as he is no longer jostling those around him, but before he can, his teammate in front of him begins to half-skip on her long legs before settling into an easy jog.

Having been so focused on his immediate surroundings, William had not heard the echoing commands of the drill instructor farther down the hall. Each terse sentence that he barks out either calls into question the recruits’ heritage or demands that they pick up the pace, lest they be the last to arrive at their destination. William has no choice but to lengthen his stride and join the stampede.

The hallway through which they are running is wider than the tunnels they’d been allowed in before. The doors that are set into the recesses along the walls seem larger as well. There is nearly enough room for two cars to fit beside each other, yet, to William, it still feels cramped as the people around him begin to breathe heavily from their unplanned exertion. Their run takes them around three more bends that curve gently through the rock, before eventually taking them up a gentle incline, through an archway, and into a large cavern.

The floor of the cavern is divided up into a series of sections, some with sets of painted lines and pieces of exercise equipment laid out while others contain oddly shaped boxes and containers that tower over the people huddled beneath them. Each section has a glowing display of a specific team’s designation above it. The crowd is bunched up at the entrance but slowly oozing outward, as the pressure of more people entering forces them deeper into the room.

“Form up in your designated areas to begin the day’s training,” another guard yells at them from just inside the cavern. Suspecting that those might be the instructions issued for this portion of the day, William had already begun scanning the cavern as soon as he entered. Being the first to start looking, he was also the first to find his team’s code; it is located part way along the left wall, between what looks like two stories of scaffolding and a field of concrete tombstones rising from the floor.

“Come on guys, this way,” William calls, pitching his voice so that his teammates, who are milling around in front of him, can hear over the general murmur of the crowd. He points in the direction of their destination, and then starts pushing his way through the crowd. Breaking through the edge of the congregation, William looks back, and, noticing that the two girls from his team are following him, he starts to lightly jog.

About halfway to their destination, William realizes that the others must have seen where they are going, because, as he threads his way through a maze of stacked wooden boxes, the two other guys on the team push past, nearly sending him tumbling head first as they sprint towards their goal. Just as he is about to gain stride again, the tall blonde, who—if he remembers correctly from her file—has been designated as Mary, but whose original name is Florence, strides past him. Her long legs make each step look effortless, but instead of appearing graceful, she has a look of mechanical determination.

Looking down the aisle, he is just able to see the two guys round the final bend before their destination. The shorter of the two, the one with the embroidered star on his shoulder, is leading. According to his file, his name used to be Antonio, but like the rest of them, his name has been standardized. He is now called Mike. Not far behind him, William sees the broad shoulders of Rick, formerly known as Jackson, round the corner; the way he runs gives him the appearance of a lumbering bear, each stride seeming to take too long but allowing him to cover ground powerfully and efficiently, a likely legacy of his past trajectory towards professional sports.

As he chases down his teammates, William realizes that he is finding it difficult, even with people he hasn’t really met yet, to use their homogenized names. Just like how he doesn’t think of himself as “Bob,” he can’t imagine that Antonio is really Mike or Jackson is really Rick. Each time he thinks of their standardized names, he can’t help but mentally note their real names.

He makes it almost to the corner before Mary (Florence) disappears too, seeming intent upon chasing down Mike (Antonio) and Rick (Jackson). Focusing around the corner, William doesn’t notice the final member of the team pull even with him until she speaks.

“Hey I’m Jill... but I guess you’re supposed to call me Linda.” Her voice is soft but rhythmic, like the waves on a lake shore, but the twinkle in her eyes—coupled with their deep intensity—leave William with the impression that she is anything but shallow. “Let them go ahead and tire themselves out. They think that if they get there first, they’ll earn more points or something stupid. You’d think they actually want to do well here. I mean, why bother? It’s not like they can really throw us in jail for not working hard enough.”

William, feeling more out of breath than he is used to, only manages a noncommittal grunt. If he’d had the breath to say more though, it is unlikely he’d have gotten the chance, since they round the corner to find themselves directly in front of their destination before he can really wrap his mind around her strange mix of bubbly cheer and fatalism.

Waiting for the last of pack to arrive is a guard, standing before a board with a picture of a small red cube on it; he is tapping his foot while glancing at the clipboard he is holding.

“All right, listen up, because I’m only going through this once, and there will be no second chances in this exercise,” he barks at the group. “Somewhere in the maze behind me, you’ll find a cube like this,” the guard uses his clipboard to indicate the cube displayed behind him. “You’re to retrieve it and bring it back to me as quickly as possible. Additionally, there are other teams with the same goal. There will be a penalty for the entire team should you fail. On the other hand, whoever returns the cube to me will receive a reward during dessert tonight, courtesy of the overseer. Once the horn sounds, you are to commence. Remember, the objective is your only concern. Win at all costs.”

William’s mind is sprinting to catch up. Obviously his teammates have worked together before, there seems to be an established dynamic between them, but he doesn’t know anything more than what their files tell him. The ominous ramifications of the guard’s terse speech don’t register in William’s mind at first as he is too busy trying to figure out a way to introduce himself and assume his role as the team leader before the drill starts.

When the implications of the guard’s briefing dawn on William, it is too late. As he looks up to ask the guard a question, the man is checking his watch, before nodding his head and gesturing for the group to follow him over to a metal railing that stands along the edge of the field of tombstones—similar to the field that William saw when he first entered the cavern. Except instead of only rising as high as his knees, the tombstones here rise easily higher than Rick’s (Jackson’s) head. Once at the railing, it becomes clear that the stones are actually installed in a pit, with only the top portion of the concrete pillars rising above the main floor level. In the shadows around the bases of the pillars there are wooden walls that turn the open grid into a maze by connecting each tower to its neighbors. Peering over the edge, William can make out a narrow staircase leading down, seemingly clinging to the wall, as if attempting to escape the maze.

In the center of the hall, a horn sounds, echoing off the walls before fading. The guard unlatches a gate in the railing and steps aside. Rick (Jackson) and Mike (Antonio) are the first two through the gate, followed closely by Mary (Florence). William glances at Linda (Jill) before following the rest down into the pit. She is staring intently at the railing and the concrete towers beyond. Without saying anything, she suddenly lunges forward, covering the distance to the rail in two quick strides. She then vaults up and onto the rail and springs towards the closest tower. She lands atop it in a crouch and glances back at William before sticking out her tongue at him and leaping to the next tower. Judging the distances and heights of the towers for himself, William shakes his head and makes his way down the steps into the maze after the others.