Qualify (51 page)

My heart is racing as I make my way past many staring Candidates in the lounge. I remember once again that yeah, I am kind of famous now, in a weird way, not only among my dorm-mates but probably all around the RQC, as word of my weird voice and shuttle levitation demo is spreading.

It’s been one helluva day.

Upstairs, the girls’ dormitory floor is no different. Girls glance and whisper and stare at me as I walk past the rows of beds.

“Gwen!” Hasmik waves to me enthusiastically. Laronda and Dawn are sitting on her bed wearing sleeping shirts and undies. They stop chatting and attack me with questions.

“Are you okay, girl? OMG, what happened?”

I smile and tell them, meanwhile noticing how other girls from distant beds look at me as if I’m some kind of alien zoo specimen. Even the alpha mean girls stop their own chatter and glare at me. I can see Ashley and Claudia giving me long killing looks, and then Olivia gets up and purposefully walks by in nothing but a sleek nightshirt and sleeping bra over her super-well-endowed chest, her smooth long legs glistening with newly applied lotion.

“Nice rack on that chick,” Dawn quips when Olivia’s far away and out of hearing. Laronda rolls her eyes and punches Dawn on the arm.

“What?” Dawn says. “I like boobs. Even on a-hole bitches.” And then she gives Olivia another glance.

“Since when do you check out other girls, girlfriend?”

Dawn shrugs. There’s a little shy smile on her face. “Since always.”

Laronda gives a loud snort-laugh and puts her hand to her mouth. “Wait, are you—”

“Yeah.”

I get into bed while they’re all still talking and giggling. Suddenly I am deathly tired. But my mind is swimming with so many conflicting emotions—joy and stress, exuberance and the ever-present old twinges of despair that comes from the knowledge of impending apocalypse.

When the dormitory lights go out, I am already on the edges of a fragile dream.

Chapter 28

T
he next morning I wake up to claxons and day seven of Qualification. It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole week at the RQC.

Suddenly everything is racing, it seems—events, levels of stress, difficulty of classes. Things good and bad, mixed up together.

It’s actually hard to describe that day—and now that I think about it, most of the following days—because after that first week, nothing drastically weird happens, and it all kind of runs together and becomes a blur of general routine.

Everything, all the three weeks of Qualification that remain to us, are leading up to the day of Semi-Finals.

And that time goes by quickly and uneventfully for the twenty-one days that follow.

W
e attend classes where we learn more about Atlantis and how to fight and defend ourselves with hand-to-hand combat and with weapons of the Four Quadrants, particularly our own nets and cords. We hone our singing with complicated note sequences. We tone our bodies. Yeah, even those of us who are nerdy klutzes such as yours truly, improve. . . . And while my body still hurts constantly all over with a dull neverending ache, it slowly lessens every night as my endurance increases and my muscles get stronger.

In Agility Training I still get occasional last place demerits for running laps, but only three times in week two and twice in week three. On the fourth week of Agility Training, to my own amazement, I manage to squeak by without a single running demerit. As far as climbing and monkey bars, yeah, I barely learn to hand swing halfway across the scaffolding by the middle of week two, and finally cross the whole distance with my hands by the end of the third week, though inconsistently, four times out of seven. And on week four I make it six times out of seven. Oalla Keigeri gives me a nod of approval the first time I do it. And it feels kind of amazing!

Talking about amazing—turns out, I am actually pretty good in Combat. After that first time when I held my own against Claudia Grito, I find that I am quick and steady with strikes, punches and parries, which more than makes up for my untrained muscle weakness. Er-Du Forms become relatively comfortable if not easy after I learn to hold each precise position, because they make good natural sense, and there’s a logic and beauty to the combinations of movement. When the Instructors start scoring us, I generally find myself in the top third of my class when it comes to Forms. Of course it helps that I get that extra lesson time every night from watching Aeson Kass and Blayne in the evening sparring sessions—but more on that in a moment.

Combat classes get more interesting on week two when we are taught how to use cords and nets as true weapons. The key to our native Quadrant weapon, Keruvat Ruo tells us, is the potential for
entanglement
of the opponent.

“Think of a spider weaving a web,” he says. “The strands stick together and bind the prey with a combination of adhesiveness and tight bonds. The spider also injects a paralytic to render the prey unconscious. In your case, all you have is one out of three—the ability to create tight restraining bonds. Your opponent is neither paralyzed, nor is there sticky glue involved. All you have on your side is speed and the ability to tie knots and otherwise shape the cord to restrain your opponent’s mobility.”

For all of week two we practice a variety of intricate knotting techniques, so that Tremaine walks around whistling sailor tunes. “We’re in the navy, man!” he drawls. “I’m gonna start tying my locks together in new combo knots!”

After the fancy knots, we are taught combinations of loops and string figures that feel like a complex version of the “cat’s cradle” game, using finger agility. On the first day of week three, Oalla Keigeri shows us how to “hand-crochet” a net using nothing but string and our fingers. It is amazing, because it really does resemble crocheting with yarn, except there is no crochet hook, and in its place you use your index finger to pull the string into loops.

“At last, I am a certified ninja granny,” Laronda says on the first night of week three, sitting on her dormitory cot, as she finger-manipulates coarse rope into a net that has grown to a radius of five feet around her—and I’m right next to her, doing the same thing on my cot. We race each other as our nets grow, and when we run out of string from the balls given us, we let it all out and start again.

“I love knitting and crochet,” Hasmik says from her cot on the other side of me, as her fingers fly in the making of her own net. “In Yerevan, Armenia, we all knit and crochet all the time. My grandmother teach me and my mother too. When we first came to Boston and started to learn English, I tell people I like to work with crochet hook, that I was a good hooker. Okay, they tell me, ‘No, no, hooker is a bad word, don’t say that!’ Oops! See, this is fun!” Admittedly, Hasmik has a point, because her nets are consistently the best in our class, and she has the fastest hands and fingers you can imagine.

During week four, Combat becomes truly intense. Because for the first time we are allowed to interact with Candidates from the other Quadrants, and their own native weapons are pitted against ours.

Mixed classes are taught in the Arena Commons Building. There we go up against the Reds and their sword and knife blade techniques, the Greens and their shields and bucklers and body armor, and the Blues with their projectile weapons and firearms which for now employ safety rounds, rubber bullets, and paintball pellets.

“Each Quadrant weapon presents a natural advantage and disadvantage,” Oalla Keigeri tells us, while Keruvat Ruo demonstrates.

“Blue holds the immediate advantage from a distance over everyone except Green and their shields. Yellows—do not let yourself get shot in the first few seconds. Move in quickly, and narrow the distance between you and Blue. Then you can overpower the Blue with your net and cord, up-close and personal.”

“Red is the exact opposite,” Xelio Vekahat tells us. “Yellow needs to stay as far away as possible, because you will be cut up with the blades, and your cord weapons rendered useless. However, you can still trap Red and render your opponent harmless if you cast your nets and cords in such a way as to disarm them.”

“Green is tricky,” Erita Qwas says. “Neither distance nor proximity is best when it comes to Yellow fighting Green. Instead, you need to maintain a middle distance and use speed and entanglement, while faced with the blunt force of their shields used as impact weapons to attack you.”

And then they bring out the hoverboards.

Oh, yeah.
We get to learn to fight while airborne
.

It amazes me what a difference a few weeks makes when it comes to learning to keep balance on top of a hovering flat surface. By week two, we no longer use English commands to control the hoverboards in Agility training, and have switched to musical note sequences—since by then we’ve also become proficient in the Atlantis Tech classes with the basic levitation commands.

Week two is all about going up and down on the hoverboard and varying heights. Week three is all about
speed
. First we race along the perimeter of the basement Training Hall in our dorm. Then the later classes are taken to the Arena Commons where we are told to race around the entire arena track, moving as fast as we can without falling off. Many board riders capsize on that third week, and that’s when most of the more serious injuries begin to happen. . . . And yes, unfortunately people are Disqualified on that basis, as they get taken out of the RQC in medical ambulances.

By week four, my fear of heights is still there, but it has become a numb secondary thing that I overpower somehow every day, keeping it under tight control. I am never too fast on the hoverboard, but neither am I the slowest one. Instead, I clench my hands and maintain control, and breathe,
breathe
, as I make my flying laps sharp and effective, making each second count.

That way, by the time hoverboards are introduced in Combat, it’s no longer a shock.

M
eanwhile, in all these days of training, there’s Logan Sangre. He’s what keeps me sane in all this pressure-cooker atmosphere of the RQC, as we meet every day, as many times a day as possible. Seems like wherever I turn, there’s Logan. We train together every night during Homework Hour. We eat lunch and when possible, dinner together. He walks me back from the evening training at the Arena Commons every night. And sometimes, when we get to a certain spot between two buildings where there’s no sign of surveillance cameras—at least not any we can humanly imagine in such a tight place—sometimes Logan and I make out.

Yeah, it’s mostly very intense and brief kissing, with me propped up against a wall and Logan’s hands supporting me as we struggle against each other in sweet crazy heat. His lips crush my mouth, and his tongue enters, hungrily, and I get my first taste of tongue kissing. His mouth tastes sweet, and there is nothing really I can compare it to. . . .

A few seconds in, he presses his body tight against me, and his arms and hands go around my back as he just holds me, very very tight, breathing hard in my throat, and I can hear the wild beating of his strong heart through all the layers of our clothing.

But we cannot linger, so with a shudder we come apart, and sort of straighten our clothes in place, calming our breathing for a few seconds. He gently strokes my long strands of hair and I run my fingers through his tousled own, and we are like two thoroughbreds on a hair-trigger, calming each other down, or we explode. . . .

“Okay?” he whispers and his hazel eyes are at the same time clear and deep and murky with suppressed desire.

“Yeah . . .” I nod, while my pulse beat slowly calms.

And then we continue walking to our dorms, not even holding hands.

By the third week of Qualification, pretty much everyone has an idea that we’re a “thing,” including my brothers and Gracie.

“He is really nice and cute,” Gracie says about Logan, halfway into week three.

I smile at her, and thankfully don’t mention that I am glad she hasn’t been spending all her time with Daniel Tover—only half of her time. And honestly, there’s not all that much that can be done about it, since I can neither supervise nor control my sister’s every move. Daniel seems to be mature and reasonable, and as far as I know he really is like an older friend treating Gracie and her childish crush decently.

Basically Gracie’s made a bunch of friends in her Red Quadrant, and Daniel’s at the center of a widespread group. At least that’s what I can glean from asking Logan about it, diplomatically—since Logan is friends with Daniel. For now at least, I’m keeping an open mind and trusting Gracie to behave and the older boy to not take advantage.

As for my brothers, George likes Logan and approves outright, especially since we’re all from the same school, so it makes it somehow even better, closer to home—if that makes any sense. Gordie seems to have no strong opinion, which, when it comes to Gordie, is normally a perfectly okay thing.

For the most part, my siblings are handling Qualification training reasonably well. Gracie loves swordfighting and knife throwing and brags about it every time we see each other. According to Gracie, Red Quadrant Atlanteans fight with multiple swords at once, two being the default, and they manage to incorporate additional smaller daggers and micro-blades in every maneuver. Then she shows me a neat trick with her fingers, opening and closing her empty palm and suddenly razor-fine micro-blades are bristling from between each finger digit like claws. “We are supposed to practice hiding and transferring blades between fingers until we get it right, so it’s like second nature.”