Page 5

Hiccup.

The sound was small. Wet.

My eyes snapped open. It came from the bunk to my left.

I rolled over. In the dim red glow of the emergency track lighting, a lump was shaking under a gray wool blanket.

“Hey.”

The shaking stopped.

“If you’re going to puke, do it in the shitter,” I said.

The blanket lowered slowly and a face peered out. It was the kid I had clocked earlier, Elian. He looked twelve, though he had to be at least sixteen to be eligible for the draft. His eyes were red-rimmed, huge and terrified in a face that hadn’t finished growing into itself.

“I’m not sick,” he whispered, his voice cracking.

“Then choke on it silently,” I said, rolling over.

Elian wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I can’t sleep. The air... it tastes like metal.”

“Get used to it,” I said, rolling onto my back again. “Better than the sulfur in Sector 9.”

“My brother was here,” Elian said, the words spilling out of him. “Two years ago. He was a winger. Fast. Best in our sector. The Scouts picked him right out of the regional finals.”

I stared at the concrete and didn’t ask, because I didn’t want his brother’s name taking up space in my head. Names are weight.

“He got cut in the Crucible,” Elian continued, his voice trembling. “He was Top 50, but he didn’t make it to the kickoff of the Culling Match. He blew a knee in the prelims, and they replaced him with a Reserve player.”

“Tough shit,” I muttered.

“They canceled his deferment. They sent him to the Front.”

The silence in the bay got heavier. Nobody talked about the Front, not in the Sectors and not down here; it was the black hole the failures fell into, and every man within earshot of that blanket had the same piece of paper folded somewhere in his gear.

“We got the letter three months later,” Elian whispered. “No body. Just a letter saying he served the Regime with distinction.”

At least someone had been there to open it. If the Regime ever printed one with my name on it, the letter would rot in a dead-mail bin behind the sector office, because there was nobody left to sign for me. I had stopped deciding a long time ago whether that made me weaker or stronger. Tonight it felt like stronger. The Regime couldn’t threaten what I didn’t have.

He drew a shaky breath.

“A guy from his unit came back. Lost an arm. He told me... he told me they don’t even give you a rifle until the third wave. They give you a shovel. You dig the trench until the enemy artillery zeros in on your heat signature.”

I gritted my teeth against the image, but it arrived anyway. Mud. Shrapnel. A boy who used to run fast, blowing apart in a ditch he dug himself.

The Veskar Union, the posters called them, the animals across the Cinder Basin who wanted our ore and our rivers. I had never met a Veskari. What I had met was the smelter row that cast the shells, and the boys who grew up beside it, who went to the Basin on the transports and never came back. Thirty-one years of war, and the only thing I had ever seen it produce in Sector 9 was empty bunks.

“He was twenty,” Elian said. “He just wanted to play soccer.”

“We aren’t here to play soccer, kid.”

I sat up. The cheap bed frame groaned under the shift.

“We are here to prove we are too fucking valuable to waste,” I said. “The Regime doesn’t care about your brother. They don’t care about your tears. You cry in here, the sharks smell blood.”

Elian shrank back into his pillow. “I don’t want to die.”

“Then stop crying and go to sleep. We have drills at 0600.”