Now that I knew about Candidate Group it was all I could think about. Carla and Lion and Nico had already passed the fitness test, but a girl whose bed was near mine told me she had failed it the first time around. She was allowed to take the test again after the holidays, but she was worried about the push-ups and sit-ups. She said she could run the ten miles and do the sixty-minute dive at the pool, but the other things she wasn’t so sure about.
I could take the test then too, since I had arrived after the school year began. But I couldn’t do any of the things she mentioned. Maybe I could do the dive—I’d managed thirty minutes during my last session at the pool. But the ten miles? I could barely complete two at our morning fitness run.
During the next free period I sought out Lion, who I’d seen running extra laps around the track in the yard during free period. I stood where I could see him go past. The cold pinched my fingers and toes, and I stomped my feet. Rockets sparked and fizzed overhead. I wanted to look at my book, which was about robotics, but I didn’t. I waited. Finally Lion appeared and I waved. He ran past me and then ran back.
He stopped in front of me and put his hands on his thighs; his breath made clouds in the air.
I said, I’m not going to pass the Candidate Group fitness test. I’m smaller than everyone else to begin with—
Size isn’t what matters. It’s strength and endurance.
We watched some kids run by, their sneakers crunching on the gravel. Lion leaned against the building and stretched his legs. Did you exercise before you came here? Train your body?
I used to throw a stick for my dog Duster.
I don’t think that counts.
Can you help me?
You’ll have to eat more.
The food is bad—
Yeah. It sucks. You have to choke it down.
I said I’d try, and he said we could start in the morning but I’d have to get up before everyone else. That’s what he did, and I should too.
The next day I woke before dawn. The huge room was hushed; all the other girls were still asleep, even Carla, with their blankets pulled up to their chins. The floor was freezing under my socked feet and I dressed quickly.
I met Lion outside the girls’ dormitory under a sky that looked like snow. He laughed when he saw me. My coat was puffy with the layers I was wearing underneath—track pants (I’d traded for them with another girl the night before), a long-sleeved shirt, and a thick sweater.
He was wearing thermal underwear under shorts, a hooded sweatshirt with the outline of a shark on it, and a pair of very clean white sneakers. His hands were buried deep in the pocket of his sweatshirt. At least take off the sweater, he said.
I pulled off my sweater and he showed me how to stretch my legs, and I tried to move my body the way he did.
No, your left foot. His breath made a cloud in front of his face. Bend it like this, over your right knee.
I pushed my hair from my face and did what he said but it still wasn’t right.
He showed me again.
We did many more stretches, and I saw him suppress a smile when I lost my balance as I reached my arms behind my back like he did.
Finally we were done. This early we can run on the Candidate track, Lion said, and started toward the second track I’d noticed my first morning at Peter Reed. We skirted the stretch of snowy field, and Lion sped up as soon as we reached the pavement—unlike our track it was fully cleared of snow.
My feet smacked the pavement while Lion’s barely made any noise at all. Just a soft sup sup, sup sup. The cold air burned my throat. My feet felt heavy, irregular. I was already breathing hard.
Up ahead another pair of runners came toward us through the frosty air—Theresa and James. They were wearing blue track pants and sweatshirts with the Explorer program insignia on the sleeves. I drew myself up, tried to get my breathing under control.
Then they were right in front of us, the sound of their feet hitting the pavement steady and rhythmic. Theresa wore a blue fleece headband that covered her forehead and ears, and her ponytail streamed out behind her. The way she ran seemed to be all one fluid motion. James took up more space on the track than she did, and he had a long, lean, powerful stride. His cheeks were red from the cold and it reminded me of the day we stood in the field and watched Inquiry’s launch.
They didn’t acknowledge us as they ran past. I tried to catch James’s eye—I wanted him to remember me. I wanted to ask him about the rescue mission. Lion shifted to the right, off the track to let them go by, and at the last second James turned his head. He had an intense way of looking at people, almost like his gaze was pinning you in place. A memory rose up in my mind—of him standing at my uncle’s door, a stack of handwritten computations in his hands. He’d looked at me the same way when I’d told him, My uncle’s not here.
Then he had pushed the pages into my hands and said, Tell him I figured it out, okay?
I’d brought the papers inside, sat down on the steps, and tried to read them. I stayed there studying them until the hallway turned dusky and my aunt’s paintings threw up strange shadows on the walls, until I managed to decipher the first half of the first page.
I started jogging after James and Theresa. I don’t know exactly why, what I intended to do, but for about thirty seconds I matched their pace. My feet hit the ground hard and my arms pumped against my sides.
Lion yelled, What are you doing?
Stop, I called after them, panting, and they slowed and turned around.
I put my hands on my knees. I was breathing hard and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. But I forced myself to stand up straight.
Where are you supposed to be? Theresa asked.
There’s a problem with the cell, I said. Isn’t there? A degradation due to vibration.
Theresa frowned but James looked at me with interest.
Have you fixed it? I asked.
James seemed like he might answer but Theresa spoke first. You know we can’t talk to you about that. You should head back to your dorm.
Endurance and Inquiry are identical, I said. If there’s cell failure in one—
Lion caught up to me then and pulled me off the track and away from James and Theresa. What were you saying to them? he asked.
I know them.
They’re in the middle of training. And we’re technically not supposed to be on this track.
A few yards away Theresa bent down to stretch and when she stood up her headband slipped from her ears. James reached to push it back in place, leaning close, and for a moment he hugged her face with his two hands.
I don’t want to run anymore, I said to Lion.
All right. We’ll lift instead.
I watched James’s and Theresa’s blue figures become smaller and smaller as they jogged away. I don’t want to do that either.
Come on, he said. It’ll be fun.
We walked back toward the dormitories and Lion waved me into a building with old glass windows covered in frost. The only light came from two yellow bulbs in the ceiling, and the air was filled with dust motes and smelled like rust and old socks. Gradually my eyes adjusted. The room was full of complicated machines with black metal weights that looked like wheels and thick, taut wires.
Lion’s skin was darker in here than it was outside, and his eyes brighter. He showed me the machines crowding the room. Only a few steps separated them and it was a twisting maze to move from one to the next. A few pieces of equipment appeared new and had complex digital displays, but most of them were old.
I wanted to look more closely at a machine that resembled a mechanical butterfly, but Lion said, Come on, let’s get started. He waved me to a tall black metal frame with weights threaded onto cables that hung down to the floor. He removed all but one of the weights and showed me how to stand, face toward the metal frame, legs apart, and leaning like a stiff wind blew at my back. And how to hold the handles on the ends of the cables down by my sides.
My eyes strayed to the butterfly machine nearby; it had a panel at its back secured with a line of tiny screws, and I had a small screwdriver in my pocket. I pressed my thumb to its tip and thought of James and Theresa on the track, their cheeks flushed from the cold, and about NSP’s two explorers, Inquiry and Endurance—
Are you paying attention? Lion was pulling the handles up and his arm muscles flexed.
I let go of the screwdriver. Yes.
His face was solemn. He looked like he was concentrating hard, but not in his mind. In his body. Like his brain had left his head, had migrated down his shoulder and into his biceps.
He switched positions, held the cables behind his back with very straight arms, and lifted them behind him up, up. The flex of the muscles in the backs of his arms was slight, but I could still see it. He repositioned himself, moving his feet slightly, tilting his chest an inch forward. He started the movement again, and I could see it more—the bunching up of the muscles under his skin.
It made me think about the hand we were building in Materials lab and how it needed to be like Lion’s arm muscles. I saw it in my mind. It curved its fingers; it made a fist. But Lion’s muscles were soft, and the hand was hard—
Lion, I’ve been thinking about the hand.
He stood aside and held out the handles for me. We’re not doing that right now, he said. We’re doing this.
I took the handles and slowly and shakily brought them to my chest. They had stayed perfectly still and smooth for Lion, as if the cables, his body, and the movement were all part of the same thing. But when I pulled them to my chest, they quivered. They seemed to have a life of their own, and the more I pulled, the more they shook.
Keep going, Lion said. Three more.
The vibrating inside my body got worse. My face was hot, my feet inside my sneakers hotter. I tried to quiet my limbs but I couldn’t. I told my muscles to stop shaking, but they wouldn’t.
That’s what you want, he said. That shaking’s good.
I stopped. You didn’t shake.
With a heavier weight I would have. That’s how you know it’s working. The shaking tells you your muscles are learning.
I let the cables fall. My arms felt unsettlingly light. Wobbly, like the bones had turned soft inside them. Lion pointed at another machine, one that worked the leg muscles. He showed me how to sit reclined on its cracked padded seat and push a weighted bar out, out, out with flat feet. Finally we both did twenty squats and twenty lunges. By the time we were done my thighs and bottom ached and I felt unsteady all over. I asked if we were finished lifting, at least for now, and he said it would get easier and we would come back tomorrow.