Act I, The RecordChapter 7
Chapter 7: Secret Base
Five days into the rebuilding, Layla unlocks a door at midnight and shows Fanny what she has been hiding.
On the fifth day of the rebuilding, Fanny and Layla carried panels up the scaffold of a ruined building in the Northeastern sector. Layla took the other end of every panel.
Layla had not made one remark in four days.
Every session since the rooftop, Fanny had opened with the sergeants’ line: “There is no place for mercy on the battlefield.” At first Layla mouthed it along, rolling her eyes. This morning she had not.
A crew radio overhead said the next block was clear. Nobody left to dig out. Layla’s hands stopped on the panel.
“Before this,” she said, “I felt Enders were nothing more than target practice.”
“At home an alert meant the shutters came down and somebody made tea. It was over by breakfast.” Layla looked at the panel. “Then school, and the VR. Their chests open, and there’s a clock on top.”
“The real ones have no clock.”
“I know that now.”
Fanny knew what Layla was hearing: the wails from the avenue.
“There is no place for mercy on the battlefield, Layla. I’ve told you this.”
It came out flat. She heard how wrong it was as it left her.
“They’ll be back,” she said, to the ruined sector. “We’re not even close to being strong enough...”
“...Damn them!” said Layla.
Fanny lifted the next panel. “As long as I live, I’ll end them. Every one.”
“As long as we live,” said Layla, and took the other end.
“East stairwell. Midnight.” Layla said it as the shift ended and walked off.
At midnight she led Fanny up four flights of the oldest wing, to a dead-end corridor of stacked desks. The lock on the last door was not the Academy’s.
“This is my secret base. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Understood.”
The lamp came on over a classroom that smelled of solder. Three black drones rose off a desk, each wearing a scowl drawn in cyan marker. The nearest hung before Fanny’s nose.
“You drew faces on your drones?” Then she knew that scowl. “That’s the one from the gallery! I told it kindly that it must be lost.”
“It was three mornings,” Layla told the lamp.
“You could have asked. I offered.”
“I was there.”
The cannon lay across two desks, casing off. On a cabinet’s top shelf, behind spare capacitors, a gold trophy stood with its back to the room. Under a glass dome, a seedling had three leaves open.
Layla woke the console. The screen filled with red. Each line read FULL CHARGE, 200 M, a drift in centimeters, ERROR. Fanny counted a hundred and nineteen. The drift was LEFT every time, nine to eleven centimeters.
Layla leaned on the cabinet. “Everyone thinks I sit down and it works.”
“I thought so too.”
“You were meant to.”
The last red line was dated the night of the test match. So the shot that passed her shoulder had been the fault, not Layla’s aim. Under it the screen turned green: LEFT 0.3 CM, OK. Three green lines, the last from the night before the breach. Before that, never more than two in a row.
“Three is the most it has ever been right,” said Fanny. “And you fired it at a giant.”
“On three.” Layla watched the screen. “It was never the barrel. The two halves of the charge came up at different speeds, and the shot leaned toward the faster half. I made the faster half wait. Nine thousandths of a second.”
Fanny thought of the giant. Stay right of the center line, because I’ll be using it. The shot had come by her left.
“You put me on the right,” she said. “The drift is left. You put me where a miss couldn’t reach me.”
“That was where the right edge was.”
That’s why she looked at her cells after, she thought. That’s why “Of course it was” came late.
“You can stop watching from the gallery. I’m not working hard just to take first place.”
She added, “Come down. It’s cold up there.”
“I know it’s cold. I’ve been lying on it.” Layla shut the log, not hard. “A quarter to five.”
“Five.”
“A quarter to.”
Fanny sat alone on the Academy’s front steps. The stone was cold through her trousers.
The placeSelrick Academy
I gave her the sergeants’ line, she thought, after a hundred and nineteen failures. I still have no better one.
“I wish all of this... were just a bad dream.”
Fanny got up and crossed to the drill hall, where a lamp still burned over the one narrow door.