32The fallout from Vida and Jovan’s bust-up is near instantaneous. Within the span of a day, we go from a fledging army mostly unified against a common enemy to a house divided against itself. Sides are taken and daggers drawn as students flock to one banner or the other, driven by prevailing friendships, established loyalties, and old resentments.

I eye the deepening divide with growing alarm, watching as old groups splinter and new ones quickly form. While at first it appears to be a simple split down the middle, with Vida and her supporters on one side and Jovan and his on the other, as time wears on, the situation proves to be fraught with far more complexities than that, as evidenced at lunch a few days after the breakup.

“Hey, Trey! Over here!” Jovan yells, while at the same time, on the other side of the kitchen tree next to Vida, Xylla calls, “I’m right here, Trey!”

Bowl in hand, Trey pauses, a panicked look on his face as he swivels his head between the two groups. On one side of the divide is his girlfriend, and on the other is his best buddy. If he sits with Xylla, Jovan will feel betrayed; if he chooses Jovan, Xylla will never talk to him again. Either way, he’s slag out of luck, and judging from the look on his face, he knows it.

“Uh . . . I just have to . . . finish . . . the thing,” he stammers quickly before grabbing a fork and fleeing the scene.

Though not unsympathetic to his situation, I can’t help snorting at his conspicuous exit. Smooth, Trey. Real smooth.

He’s not the only one caught in a tricky situation. Many find themselves caught in the middle, with friends on both sides and no way to choose between them, but even the ones who prefer to stay out of it unwittingly find themselves drawn in as they’re confronted by the others and forced to take sides. Public opinion on the whole debacle is completely split, some sympathizing with Vida after the way Jovan cheated on her while others say the overbearing Queen B just got what she deserved. Djen’s new status as Jovan’s girlfriend only complicates things more, as there are any number of people who like Djen but hate Jovan, or hate Djen but like Jovan, or like Vida and Djen but hate Jovan, or hate Vida and Jovan but like Djen. The list goes on, and even I can’t keep up with it.

I do my best to stay above it all, refusing to engage on the subject and immediately shifting the conversation back to the war anytime someone tries to bring it up. Most take the hint, but anyone who persists inevitably find themselves on latrine duty when the next chore roster comes out, and the offender gets the message soon enough.

Social cataclysm notwithstanding, there’s still a war to be fought, and I refuse to allow any amount of high school drama to get in the way. Instead, I forge ahead with my offensive campaign, narrowing my focus in on a warehouse full of spare solar panels. The squatters replaced the ones we smashed up at the terraforming bunker a month ago, and it has occurred to me that as long as there are spare cells to be had, they’ll just keep replacing anything we break. However, with the net laid, there’s no way to import additional supplies, so if we can take out their stash of spares, anything we break will stay broken. Not a crippling blow by any means—not with that hydroelectric dam and any number of generators still in operation—but a good start nonetheless. As such, I plan our most ambitious mission yet: a multipronged assault against the warehouse plus all five accessible platform arrays. The mission plan is easy. Assigning personnel is a nightmare.

“Seriously? You expect me to take orders from her?”

“I’m not being on a team with him.”

“I don’t trust her, not by a long shot. For that matter, I don’t trust him either.”

“Me, be on a team with them? No, absolutely not.”

As if the strife in camp isn’t bad enough, the bad blood engendered by the social shake-up makes creating six teams worth of people who don’t currently hate each other downright impossible. No matter how I arrange everyone, there are always several someones who refuse to work with someone else. After two days of shuffling personnel around, I’m ready to pull my hair out. With the camp at loggerheads, I reluctantly decide the best thing to do is scale back the plan, hitting only the storage facility for spare panels on the first round and coming back for the platform arrays on subsequent runs. Though not as elegant, the plan is sound. However, when I get my—mostly—copacetic team to town for the strike, it’s only to find that the enviro-shield won’t open.

I futilely scan my card for the half-dozenth time and swear. “Slag! They deactivated the access card.”

“Looks like it,” Merc agrees. “They must have finally put two and two together and figured out the raids were coming from outside the shield, not in.”

“Can you reactivate it?”

“Probably, but not here.” He shakes his head. “These outside control panels are readers only. In order to reactivate the card—or better yet, make all new ones—I’ll need to access the program in the master control panel first.”

“As in, the master control panel located inside the shield?” At his nod, I sigh. “Perfect.”

Nothing else to do, we abort the mission and return home. As missions go, it’s hardly a catastrophe—no one was injured, killed or infected—but from a morale standpoint, it’s discouraging all the same. I refuse to let anyone dwell on it, publicly shrugging it off as a minor setback and sending people out the next day to search for a hole in the enviro-shield big enough to slip through. I have no doubt we’ll find one. The enviro-shield is vast, and Iolanthe’s press is never-ending. It’s not a matter of if we’ll find a hole, but where and when.

Three days later, we find a viable gap, and within the week, we have access to the shield again. But though we’re back in the war, we soon learn that the card deactivation was only the beginning. Old locks are replaced with new high-tech ones, alarm systems are installed in key facilities, and surveillance drones and local security begin appearing in places previously left unguarded.

I watch the new measures go in via drone, grateful I had the presence of mind to put my own SDs on the enemy weeks ago lest we walk straight into a trap. The new security, though frustrating, isn’t entirely unexpected, but it does slow us down. Missions are postponed and raids put on hold as we’re forced to scout facilities for alternative ways in, study guard schedules for gaps in their rotation, and come up with creative strategies to distract and draw off enemy SDs—all tedious, labor-intensive activities that often require long hours of scrolling through drone footage and taking detailed notes. Though initially I recruit others to help with the rote work, as time goes on, I find myself doing more and more of it on my own as the others drop out one by one due to boredom, drama, and basic incompetence. Even my inner circle has fallen off, deterred by the stalled campaign and increasingly claimed by the conflict suffusing the camp.

Afraid of losing my army when we’ve barely gotten started, I take to working long hours, often rising early before anyone else is up and going to bed well after everyone’s asleep—anything to get this war going again. Though I earn more than a few people’s enmity by using up the camp’s coffee supply, my efforts are worth it as I manage to process enough intel to plan and successfully execute two small maneuvers. Minor raids, nothing like the multipronged attack I’d originally planned, but enough to kickstart our campaign and regain some of the momentum we lost.

Unfortunately, the offensive against the Specs isn’t the only thing that’s gaining momentum.

“—just get out of my way already!”

“Yeah? And who’s going to make me? Your boyfriend? Oh, that’s right. He’s my boyfriend now.”

“Only because you stole him!”

“Keep out of this, Xyl!”

The strident voices echo through the camp, yet another argument in what’s become a growing number of such in the past couple of weeks. I listen to them carry on from inside my tent, my annoyance increasing exponentially with every new voice that joins the row.

“—just using you! If Vida had been here, he never would’ve looked at you twice.”

“Hey, leave her alone!”

“Don’t talk to my girlfriend that way!”

At the latest rejoinder, something in me snaps. Throwing down my stylus, I rip open the flap to my tent and stomp out, descending on the bickering group like an avenging angel.

“Break it up, everyone! I mean it, that’s enough!” Djen starts to speak, and I immediately round on her. “As I recall, you were assigned to clean and restock the showers today. Have you done it? No? Then go do it—now. As for the rest of you . . .”

I leave the threat unfinished, but it’s enough. With a final array of angry glares and disgruntled murmurs, the group breaks up, driven away by the threat of having to do actual chores. I shudder to think what will happen on the day it occurs to them that they don’t technically have to do anything I tell them. Luckily, that’s not today. As I turn to go back to my tent, something flashes at me from the corner of my eye.

My heart stops.

Glinting from Ri’s right hand is the cold, hard barrel of a decimator.