Adele Poole sits and fidgets in the chair. The brick-red jumpsuit they gave her doesn’t entirely fit, bulging and tight in all the wrong places. The concrete room is featureless except for the benches and the buzzing fluorescent lights. When the air vent rumbles to life and starts blowing, she jumps.
It’s hard to wait. So close, you’d think she could muster patience, but it turns out, the closer you are to something you’ve wanted this badly for as long as you can remember, it’s more agonizing than not having any hope of attaining it at all.
Patience, she tells herself. You’ve waited for years. A few more minutes isn’t going to kill you.
There’s another person in the room with her, a boy her age, with floppy hair and the tan of a lifeguard, sitting on the bench by the opposite wall. He’s in a similar brick-red jumpsuit. “Miller” is the name stitched over the yellow triangle logo on his breast.
She needs to take her mind off the waiting somehow, and this guy is cute, at least. “What’s your first name?”
He looks at her like he’s surprised she can speak. “Sorry?”
“I see Miller’s your last name. What’s your first? Mine’s Adele. Poole.” She points to the name tag over the triangle-with-the-heartbeat-line logo on her left breast.
“Mason,” he says. He leans awkwardly off the bench and across the floor to shake her hand.
“When’d you get the word? I mean, that you were eligible for the surgery?”
“A couple days ago. My mom found the listing online, we took the test from AccuChieve, and the word came back, like, fast. Less than a week. She’s always said I’m special. She’s always looking for opportunities, and as soon as this one popped up, she signed me up in seconds.”
“You . . . thought you were latent before? A psiot, I mean?”
“For a little bit. Sophomore year. I was kind of dating this girl who was a full-on psiot, but then we went to the movies one time, and . . .” He blushes and looks at his feet. “It’s not important.”
“Yeah, I thought I was, like, ‘sensitive’ since, I’d say, the seventh grade? I mean, those kids online, even if half those videos were faked . . . I just wanted to be like them, you know? I even got into this reality show that was training would-be psiots how to use their powers. Got flown out to this resort island in Greece and everything, but the guy who was running the show, he turned out to be a real skeeve.”
That memory, the night everyone at the Power Party shoot got released from Twyst’s mental control, is less than pleasant, so Adele is actually grateful when the orange alarm starts spinning in one high corner of the room, along with a startling Klaxon. One entire concrete wall of the room slides upward, revealing a much bigger chamber beyond.
Adele looks at Mason Miller. Mason Miller looks at her.
“Here goes everything,” she says.
Adele is the first out the door, into a large room that looks like an obstacle course, with gymnastic horses and mats all over the floor and rings sticking out of the ceiling big enough to fly through if people could fly. She can see other walls sliding open all around the circular perimeter of the training area and boy-girl pairs emerging from their own small waiting areas, as blinking and confused as she must look.
In the center of the room is an old dude in the same brick-red jumpsuit everyone else is wearing, standing up on a little podium with his hands clasped behind his back. He reminds her of her last gym teacher.
“All right,” the old guy says, “line up in front of me, two rows, let’s go.”
Everyone moves slowly, hesitantly, and he has to yell, “Move, I said!” to get a spring in their step. Adele makes sure to stand in the front row and can see the name “Palmer” stitched over the old guy’s heart.
“I hope you are all fully recovered from receiving your implants because from this point on, the amount of mercy I will be showing you will be precisely zero,” Palmer yells. A full day removed from the implant surgery, Adele has finally stopped touching the red bump at the base of her skull where the tiny engram device was inserted, and doesn’t want to start again now. The lump itches a bit when Palmer mentions it, though.
“Just because you were determined to have brain patterns compatible with the engram does not mean you are automatically on my team. That is what the next few days will determine. I will be your drill instructor and field commander. When, and only when, I decide you are ready, you will be sent into the field to combat hostile psiots and . . . other more-than-human individuals. You will likely be facing down mundane opponents with more conventional firearms as well. Regardless of who you face, the desired outcome of any hostile encounter will always be the same. Survival.”
He takes his hand from behind his back, and now Adele sees he has a shotgun in it. He pumps it with a hand. Then he points it and fires it at her.
The boom is deafening, and the other trainees scatter, but Adele isn’t there anymore. She saw the shotgun and moved to one side. She feels a slight sting on the side of her hip as a few stray pellets tear at her uniform, but she doesn’t think about that. She’s moving forward, cutting through the air with a hiss, like she’s a human whip, cracking.
Adele snatches the shotgun away from Palmer with her right hand and instinctually lashes out with her left. She hits him harder than anyone she’s ever hit before, and the translucent force field that surrounds his body the instant she connects is the only thing that keeps his ribs intact—of this she is certain.
Still, he flies back off the dais and skids, bouncing on his ass, across the floor. Adele nearly cries out in joy. She’s super. She always knew she was super! But she now actually did a super thing! It feels amazing.
But then she gasps. What has she done? She just knocked the teacher on his butt in the first seconds of her first day of class. Is she in trouble? Is she going to get kicked out? To finally have achieved powers after so long, after wanting them as hard as she’s ever wanted anything, including oxygen, would just be the cruelest punch line to a short life she’s already seen as a bad joke.
When Palmer picks himself up, though, he’s grinning wide. “What’s your name, trainee?”
“A-Adele, sir,” she says. “Poole.”
“Adele Poole.” He shakes her hand after taking the shotgun out of it. “Excellent response time, Miss Poole. Welcome to the Harbinger Active Resistance Division. We call it HARD Corps.”