10

The commander’s tentacles filled most of the free space in the tiny craft that dropped out of the lunar night, leaving Amira and me to push ourselves as far up against the back bench as we could.

Through the large porthole on my side I watched as we arced high over the cratered mountains in the dark, whipping a mile overhead a desolate landscape punctuated by the occasional grid and piping of lunar mining facilities.

There were so many craters. The Earth-facing side of the moon had been smoother with its seas and plains. The dark side looked as if it had been in a long, losing war: billions of years of constant artillery bombardment, ravaged by the vengeance of outer space’s constant barrage of rocks from beyond Earth’s orbit.

All around me, as far as I could see right now, was the Icarus crater. It was almost sixty miles wide, and we’d been flying over it for the last couple minutes.

“Big railgun,” Amira said. I looked out her porthole. A mile-long bridge-like structure ran along the surface. It held a long pipe in its struts rather than a road, though. “A mining facility. They’re taking the processed ore chunks and just shooting them in capsules to wherever in orbit they need to go for Accordance projects.”

As we watched, lights danced up and down the trusses and a capsule slightly bigger than the craft we sat in hurtled toward the horizon and rose up into orbit.

A minute or two later, another one followed it.

“Your new home.” Commander Zeus tapped an armored tip against the curved screen in front of him.

The lights of the Icarus training facility lit up the horizon, then almost blinded me as we crested a hill. The craft shuddered as the commander fired engines to slow our forward motion to a near stop, leaving us hanging just over the complex.

Below us an entire crater had been capped with a clear dome, then filled with ponds, brush, bridges, obstacle courses, and other objects I couldn’t identify.

Four petal-shaped complexes spread out around the capped dome, making it look like a giant clover from above. More half-buried cylinders popped up inside nearby craters.

“The dome allows for a variety of conditions,” Commander Zeus explained. “We can heat it, chill it, raise the pressure, lower it. Blow wind. Flood it. Put in any number of atmospheres from a variety of planets. We can create storms, hail, winter, summer. We can change the gravity itself via dense attractor base plates buried under the ground. Your living quarters are off to the sides, your commanders live in the quarters one crater over. Be proud: We invested a lot in this for just humans.”

We gently struck a landing pad on top of one of the petals. It pulled us inside, the roof closing overhead after it.

The pad came to a shuddering halt near a row of rovers, their massive balloon-like wheels almost touching each other.

“You’re just in time,” the commander said. “While you’ve spent a day sitting around doing nothing, your teammates have had a meal, learned where their rooms are, and are getting ready for their first round of Escape the School.”

“Escape the School?” Amira asked.

“I’m told it’s a rough translation of a concept we Arvani use in our training. I want to see you all in action.”

+  +  +  +

Recruits strung out in a circle in the natural amphitheater to the back of the capped lunar dome.

We slipped in at the back of the line, taking our place. Most of the recruits were in their late teens, like me. Quite a few in their twenties, though. “War’s a young man’s game,” my father had often said. “One where older statesmen send the patriotic young to settle their elders’ disagreements with their blood.”

I looked around. Lots of thickly muscled arms and strong backs. I felt like the runt in the back. Whatever came next, I guessed I’d have to depend on quick feet and quick thinking.

Commander Zeus descended on a cabled platform from the top of the dome.

He threw a black ball out with one of his tentacles into the muddy grass in front of the recruits. “The moment your fingerprints touch the ball,” he shouted, “it registers that you have possession. It also lights up so you can’t hide with it.”

We all regarded the ball.

“The aim of this test is to show me who can hold on to the ball the longest.”

Someone raised a hand. “What happens to those who hold it the shortest? Or who don’t get it at all?”

“Your orders,” Zeus said, “are to hold on to it the longest.”

Amira stood behind me, her arms folded. “You remember the beach on the Hamptons?” I asked her. “We need to get our hands on that thing. Together.”

“One against everyone is going to be hell,” she agreed. “A bunch of us against everyone else is going to be more survivable.”

“Right. Let’s find anyone we know.”

We started walking around, looking for recruits we recognized from the trip to Tranquility City.

The platform began to rise back up into the air on its cables, lifting Zeus into a catwalk gallery under the dome.

“One last change in the current,” the alien commander shouted. “I will be venting the dome’s atmosphere until you pass out to see how you function.”

I thought about the choking moon dust lacerating my throat as I struggled to breathe back in Tranquility City.

“Hey, it’s Doughnuts,” a voice called out. Amira pulled a familiar-looking dark-haired recruit along.

“Nico’s in,” she said.

“What are the rules?” a recruit down the line shouted up at the retreating platform. It was Ken, I realized. “What are we allowed to do?”

There was no reply.

Amira yanked more people over to me. Our hasty team grabbed shoulders in a huddle. I counted ten of us, mostly all recognizable from the ride to the moon. “Here’s the idea,” I said. “If any of us can grab it, the rest of us huddle around and protect them. We rotate in, get some holding time, until we’ve all got hands on it. Then we let it go. Yell ‘ball’ and we’ll surround you. Each of us gets five seconds.”

“You sure this will work?” the recruit who’d nicknamed me Doughnuts asked.

“No,” I said. “We’ll get the shit kicked out of us trying to do it. But you think it’ll go any better with us trying it alone?”

A horn blared, an unmistakable start signal.

A scrum instantly developed over the ball. Individuals scrapping around the mud to try to hold on. Legs churned, bodies writhed.

One of the recruits staggered out of the mass of bodies, swore, then threw herself back in with a vicious elbow to someone’s neck.

“My finger’s broken! Help!” A scraggly boy crawled out and held up a hand. Bone stuck out of the side of his finger and blood ran down his wrist.

But no help came down from the gantry. Or from anywhere else.

Ken approached us, a surprisingly humble nervousness obvious in his body language. “Create a wedge,” he said. “I think that’ll get us in there.”

“There is no ‘us,’ ” I snarled at him, remembering his elbow digging into the back of my neck as he shaved my head, embarrassing me in front of Cee Cee.

He raised his hands, conciliatory. “Look, I’m sorry about the doughnuts.”

“Fuck off,” I said, and turned my back. I took several deep breaths, watching the dozens of recruits in front of us fighting like a cluster of weasels over the ball. I glanced back and saw Ken walking away, looking for someone else to join forces with.

“We need all the help we can get,” Amira muttered to me.

“Fuck him. We don’t need his help.”

“He was right about wedging in,” Amira said.

I grunted. “I guess.”

“When do we try for it?” the guy who’d called me Dough­nuts asked.

I looked over at Amira’s silver eyes. “Our instructors are venting air. When do we start getting dizzy?”

The right corner of her mouth pulled back, a half smile as she figured out what I was thinking. The first time I’d seen that. “Five minutes. More or less.”

“I want to eat dinner first tonight, if they’re pulling that stunt from the Hamptons again,” I said. “So we’re just going to stand here and take long, deep breaths. Keep yourself oxygen­ated. We’re going to form up in a triangle, and keep our arms locked together. Biggest up at the spear tip, right? If that scrum moves at all, we slowly track it. Amira, can you keep time for us?”

“Nice thinking, Doughnuts.”

“It’s Devlin,” I said. “You are?”

“Grayson.”

We linked arms and formed up, like protestors facing an advancing line of enforcers. The hard part would be waiting and holding as Amira ticked off a minute, and then another. I kept up a running patter of positive support, keeping the small squad upbeat about our plan.

“Three minutes,” she reported. The scrum broke apart. A recruit with a ripped uniform punched someone in the face and tore free. Blood streamed down his face as he held the ball to his barrel-like chest, cradled in thick, muscular arms. The ball lit up like a small sun as he placed his fingers against it. We all blinked and shielded our eyes.

“Let’s get him,” Grayson said. We all surged forward a bit.

“Walk!” I shouted. “Walk. Stay together.”

A cloud of recruits surged after the recruit with the ball. They ran across the mud toward an obstacle course away from the open clearing we’d assembled in.

Some of the runners looked woozy, but determined.

“Two minutes,” Amira called out.

“Breathe deep, walk easy,” I said as we shuffled after the prize.

The recruit finally succumbed to the crowds chasing him and went down. The scrum reassembled, occasional figures wrapping themselves around the ball in a fetal position as they got the shit kicked out of them and the ball pried out of their hands.

“One minute.”

Screams of injured recruits echoed off the dome and bounced back down at us. I glanced up at the catwalk. Zeus stood on his platform, surveying the chaos but not putting a stop to it.

“It’s sleepy time,” Amira said.

“Go!” I shouted.

Our wedge struck the scrum hard, scattering bodies and trampling people caught by surprise. We were fresh, not dizzy, and organized.

“Get the ball but don’t unlink your arms!” Amira shouted.

“Count to five, then pass it along.” I hoped that whoever had snagged it wouldn’t hog it, or I’d be screwed.

The center of our huddle lit up, dazzling my eyes as one of the recruits managed to get on his knees to retrieve the ball. Behind me, a knee struck my kidney hard enough that I sagged in place as I gasped.

I hung limp, tears running down my cheeks. Amira yanked me back onto my feet.

“Pass.”

The ball was passed to the right as we huddled and weathered a storm of scratches, punches, and attempts to pierce our human wall.

But the air loss was having an affect. The punches were weaker. The roars of rage choked. We were on our knees, arms still linked, heads together, struggling to keep strong.

When Amira awkwardly passed me the ball I hugged it to my stomach. At the count of four, the Klaxon sounded. We all flopped onto our backs and gasped fresh air as it streamed back into the dome in a rush of wind.

Commander Zeus descended from the sky on the platform, picked around the passed-out humans—sidestepping moaning recruits being tended to by struthiform medics—and ignored the still-standing survivors who eyed him warily.

“I seem to have been stuck with a mass of miserably performing apes!” the Arvani commander shouted. “And while I find you all about as appealing as barnacle growth, I have my duty. So we have a lot of work to do.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Zeus paused in front of me. “You: You performed tolerably. You will pick seven to create your arm.”

“My what?”

“Your arm,” Zeus repeated. “A collection of fighters. Eight fighters to an arm. You will be their octave.”

“Sounds like we’re going to be a group of fighting flutists,” Amira muttered behind me.

Zeus raised the voice coming from the armor. “Eventually there will be twenty-five arms here on the base. You will learn to lead your arm, and the arms will also learn to fight together and against each other. It is a privilege to be an octave. Grasp it tightly. Hurry to pick your team, or the other octaves will have their choices.”

“Amira,” I called out.

Zeus moved across the mud. “You: You are an octave.”

I didn’t pay attention to who the other octaves were. “Grayson.” He could keep calling me Doughnuts if he wanted, but he’d held the line.

“Worst game of playground dodgeball ever,” he muttered, but came to stand next to me.

I started grabbing recruits, some from our group, others that I’d noticed who’d somehow grabbed time on the ball during the exercise.

Amira tapped me on the shoulder as our team formed. “You have a fan,” she said.

Ken stood near a climbing wall, his arm in an inflatable cast and a purple welt over his right eye. He glowered at us, then pointed a finger at a tall recruit. She jogged over to join his team.

Ken pointed at me and flipped me off.

“Family privilege,” I grunted. “Welcome to Earth under the occupation. Apparently he gets to be an octave whether he’s skilled or not.”

Amira raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?” she asked.

I was.

“Hurry up and pick your team, know-it-all,” she murmured. “Pay attention, there are some people you don’t want Ken to snag from under you.”