3

A human policeman in yellow uniform opened the van door with a crunchy squeak. I looked out warily. Leftovers from the protest filled 110th Street. The ripped pieces of the command tents blew up against stacked metal barricades, along with the detritus of protestors who’d fled.

Or been dragged away.

“You’ve got two hundred feet to walk on your own.” Stafford directed me forward. “We’ll be watching you.”

The door slammed shut behind me. For the first time in twenty-four hours, sunshine hit my face and free air blew past me. I was free. Free for the two hundred feet between me and the gates of the Accordance Administrative Complex.

I picked my way around the trash and the barricades.

Halfway to the great legs of the administration buildings, I wondered if I could still run.

No. My parents were still in Accordance hands. Running would do nothing. I wasn’t really free. These two hundred feet I walked on my own were as much a cage as the heated cage I’d been penned in.

Other volunteers straggled down the street toward the two-story skeletal gates that locked down the forest of the Accordance Administrative Complex against the world around it. Four or five of the volunteers rubbed their wrists, now free of their shackles. “Volunteers.” They’d spent time in the fenced cells as well.

I wondered what horrible choices they’d had to make.

A drone buzzed overhead and blasted hot air into my face. We were live for the world to watch. Earth volunteers, signing up to join the Accordance’s war against the Conglomeration. Rise, you sons and daughters of Earth, to help the Accordance defend a vulnerable world.

“Look at them,” one of my fellow travelers said, acid in her voice. She nodded her head across the street. Ten well-dressed volunteers ambled down from the Harlem gates, where their parents clustered near struthiform guards, waving.

The volunteers waved back at their families, then at the drones in the air.

“I want to punch the shit-eating grins off their entitled faces,” the girl next to me muttered. “Our future officer class. My dad says Harlem used to be all human-held. He grew up there. After it was all evacuated and the buildings seized, it became just collaborators and aliens. You look familiar; do I know you?”

“No,” I said. Then, “I don’t know.”

“Keep moving!” Human soldiers in gray uniforms with no sign of rank on their shoulders waited on the other side of the black, bony gates. They herded us into lines that snaked through three booths in the middle of the glassy road, shoving us until we stood where they wanted.

Struthiform officers in red armor with oversize eyes and bobbing heads trotted up and down our lines, their necks undulating this way and that. “Walk through the scanners, hold your breath. Do not move,” they ordered.

“Where are the scanners?” I asked.

A feathered arm shoved me forward until I stood on a blue circle in the road between two booths.

A blast of air hit my groin. I gasped. As I crouched and swore, a spinning tube of glass shot up out of the ground around me, then dropped right back down. A struthiform technician in the booth on my right glanced briefly at a three-dimensional skeleton that appeared in the air between him and me. My skeleton. Visible to everyone in line. Then it turned into an image of my skeleton with internal organs. Then my skin filled in. I was naked in front of everyone behind me in line until the technician waved the image away.

“Move!” he ordered.

My embarrassment hadn’t even had time to form when the struthiform behind me shoved me forward so that the next recruit could stand in my place.

“Run! Run!” Pushed forward by other recruits and struthi­forms yelling at us, we jogged under the shadowed roads and around the great twisted legs of the lower buildings.

A hundred of us stopped as one on a patch of grass. A plaza in the heart of the alien forest of a city buried in the heart of New York. A human sergeant in gray marched up to our front.

I’d seen his type before: on commercial breaks between sports, on public service announcements on screens in delis.

“Listen up, you useless maggots,” he shouted, amplified words ringing out throughout the plaza. “There are many aliens out there. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. . . .”

Fuck. This was really happening.

I was going to become one of those people who disappeared off into deep Accordance space and had yet to come back.

Sweat trickled down the small of my back as I focused on an orb-shaped drone flying around the crowd for close-ups. I half listened to the description of our five enemies and what they could do to us.

I was going to let myself get shot across space. I was going to leave Earth far, far behind, and go fight a war that would be light-years away. With creatures that I’d never seen with my own eyes.

And I was going to do it for another bunch of alien creatures.

The human sergeant finished his well-rehearsed speech and left. The cameras flew away. Struthiforms yelled at us again. A line formed.

“Hold out your forearm.” The man in front of me held what looked like a nail gun.

I did, and then winced as it punctured my skin with a sharp pneumatic hiss. I looked down. A single bead of blood welled up in the center of a tattoo of a stylized Earth with a triangle in the middle. My skin sizzled around it for a second.

“What’s this?”

“Your rank and ID. Welcome to the Colonial Protection Forces. Move along.”

I stumbled forward. Another annoying orb camera dropped out of the air to eye level and circled around me as a man stepped forward. “Mr. Hart, I’m Vincent Anais, with Colonial Broadcast Agency. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to have a moment.” His voice indicated he wasn’t asking a question. I noticed he had a CPF tattoo on his forearm as well. His had two dots underneath the triangle.

“Um . . .”

“Just relax, smile, and one, two, three. . . . Mr. Hart, what prompted you to volunteer to join the fight against the Conglomeration?”

I licked my lips and tried not to look at the drone and its spiderlike clusters of unblinking camera lenses. “I . . . just want to do my bit to serve, and protect our world.”

“And how did your parents feel about this, Mr. Hart? Are they proud you joined the CPF?”

I gritted my teeth. “I think they understand why it was important that I make this choice.”

Anais smiled broadly. “So they weren’t happy about it?”

“No,” I told him. “No, they were not.”

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Hart. And thank you for your service. Your world appreciates it.”

The drone flew away, and Anais leaned forward. “Off the record, kid: You’re going to have to do a lot better than that if you want your family to stay out of trouble.”

Kid? Really? He was calling me a kid? Who the fuck was he? “I gave you what you needed,” I snapped. “I’m here, aren’t I? You got me to join, now leave me the hell alone.”

Anais grabbed my collar and yanked me forward. When I tried to pull away from him, he tightened his grip. “Listen,” he hissed. “I saw you tuning out the speech the sergeant gave back there. You think it’s all just words. But what’s out there, it’s real. There’s a black hole of an alien empire out there, reshaping the galaxy for its own purposes. It is old, impla­cable, and more alien than the aliens around us. The CPF needs minds and bodies to fight for the Accordance. This isn’t about your wounded pride, or your family’s. It’s about something far, far bigger. Your usefulness as a tool to the CPF is just beginning. So get with the fucking program and start selling it, or it’s going to get far worse, recruit.”