Chapter One: The Choice

39 years ago

-

I slam the paper down with enough vigor to wake the old, tired man behind thin glass in this recruitment center. The war has been going on for a year at this point and I just hit twenty-one. The age where you can enlist to join Safe Haven, for a non-grunt that is.

The old man glances at my recruitment sheet with very big, thick glasses and smacks his dry lips some, completely ruining this life-altering moment for me. This place is completely empty and the other recruiters are asleep on the job. We’re fighting a war, people! Treat the recruitment process with a little bit more seriousness.

“You’re late.” The old man croaks out. I roll my eyes and sigh.

“I know. I couldn’t pay the fee until now.” Ellie offered to pay for the enlistenment fee, but I couldn’t let her. She’s just seventeen and she’s gonna need that money to survive while I’m gone. I earned this through my fast-food joint job. It only took two weeks of starving and saving, but I’m here. “Please, don’t tell me that I can’t go.”

The old man looks around sneakily before looking at me directly into my eyes. “Look, you enlisted for accelerated training, you missed that deadline, but I can register you to go to the standard basic training.”

“What? I need to get out there now!” I exclaim. I bang my fist against the table, and jostle some other recruiters out of their sleep.

“Well, you should’ve enlisted in time.” The old man says sternly. Then, he spoke to me with a hint of softness in his voice. “Look, kid, we need people like you out there. Someone who’s bold and works hard. I’ve only known you for about twenty minutes and I can see that you’d make a great soldier.” He picks up the basic training stamp and hands it to me underneath the glass. “But, the choice is yours. Do you really want to protect the people of this sector, or are you gonna let being a little late stop you?”

I look at the stamp in my hand. It’s a dark wood knob with a flat, painted red bottom. It’s drenched in the red stamping ink and reminds me of blood. I look at my enlistment sheet and think about why I’m doing this.

It was like any other day. I get home from work the same time Ellie gets home from school, and changes into her uniform; She cooks me dinner, because mom is away and I have no idea how to even make spaghetti; and we sit on the couch with the little two hours we have together before she heads off. It was about five months ago, when we found out. While we were sitting on the couch watching some random sitcom, a knock on our door caught our attention.

We both get up to answer it and it’s a man in uniform holding my mother’s belongings. I froze, already knowing what this meant, but Ellie asked the man who he was and what he was doing with our mom’s stuff. He told us what happened. How Veltekkens attacked the flying human colony of Summers on Veltekk and killed about one-hundred people, our mother included in that number.

I remember holding her that night, how she bawled her eyes out and cried for mom, knowing she was already gone. We spent the whole night hugging each other and silently wishing she would walk through that door. She never did. I always knew mom wouldn’t be around forever, but I was hoping that I’d die before her. That way, I would never have to see Ellie like this.

We held a funeral a few weeks later, with no body, the Veltekkens burned down the colony and sent it crashing down into the forest below. We buried the old, tattered clothes the man in uniform had brought us that night and a photo of her smiling. I like to imagine that’s how she would’ve looked being lowered into that dark, bottomless pit we call her grave. Smiling all the way down, knowing she did the best she could.

I didn’t cry that day. I think Ellie did the crying for the both of us. It was just her, me, and the mechanic down the street that gave Ellie her job. He was kind of like a second father to Ellie, not me. I never wanted a dad again after my last one bailed on us. The three of us ate out that night, with Ellie doing most of the eating, we made sure of that. The little teenager almost cried herself to dehydration. Me? I was already planning on enlisting. I wasn’t gonna let my mom go unavenged. Let those dirty Veltekkens go unpunished.

Now, I sit here with my ticket in hand. All I need to do is bring my hand down and seal the deal, but something’s holding me back. Ellie. She needs me. Well, she doesn’t need me, she wants me in her life. To help her through the hard times. Like how I was there for her when mom died. I can’t just leave her here by herself, but I need to do this. Mom would tell me to put the stamp down and just go back home and take the safest route, but I never liked how safe she played it.

Mom never took risks. She always thought about Ellie and me in every decision she made and every action she took. She could have run off like dad did, but she didn’t and she wanted to make sure that we could live by ourselves when her bad heart gave out. She worked as a maid, because that was guaranteed work for some of the wealthier people that lived here on Winquix. She didn’t chase after her dreams of becoming a writer, because that was too risky. What if someone didn’t buy her books? What if she didn’t make enough? It was safer, less risky, less what ifs, and less time to spend with us.

I don’t hate her, but I wish she just took a step out of her comfort zone. Now, she never can, I don’t want to live my life like how she did. But, I want to be just like her, looking after the people I love with everything I’ve got.

I bring the stamp down onto the paper and let it sit there for a moment. I want the ink to seep through the paper, making it undeniable that I’m supposed to be here.

The old man smiles before smacking his dry lips again. “You’ll be shipped out within the next week.”

“Okay.” I say. “I have until next week? How far away is the camp?”

“It’s on Sectra, but don’t worry, no rich people go there anyways. Too busy sending young people like you to fight their wars.”

And, with that, I was home packing for next week, making sure Ellie had someone to look out for her, working to get extra money in her hands, and making sure I met every standard for Safe Haven. They’re shipping me off to standard training? I have to outshine the rest of them, and make sure I’m noticed by the higher ups.

Ellie spent the week sleeping in the same bed I did, trying to maximize the amount of time we had together, even in sleep. She cooked my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She held my hand and kissed my cheek goodbye everytime I headed out for work, as if Safe Haven would come and kidnap me any day.

Then, the day came, and she hugged me for as long as she could, she kissed my cheek goodbye, and waved after me the whole time I was loading up my stuff into the carrier with forty-seven others, mostly men. The ride to Sectra was cramped, stuffy, and musty. Our spoiled food at home smelled better than these boys.

After one day with that stench, we get off at our camp and I take a deep, clean breath of fresh air. It’s not long, though, because we’re shuffled into barber chairs and are ordered to match the standards. The boys had to have almost all of their hair cut off, while the girls had options. But, back at home, I cut my hair the same as the boys were cut, so there wasn’t anything to do for me. After that, we were rushed to orientation and given the debriefing on curfews, training times, schedules, and other important things.

While the colonel talked about that stuff, I surveyed the rest of my peers and realized something very quickly. I was out of my league. These boys were twice my size, some of the girls too, and had three times my muscle mass. I sat down, but realized I had to stand in order to see the colonel on stage. A feeling of dread washed over me, but I had to look calm. I don’t want to be the punching bag on the first day.

After we were released, we were given our bunk numbers and we all knew we had to share our bunks with at least three other people. I walk around the camp for my bunk until I see the lone metal box all the way on the outskirts of the camp. They must’ve thrown me in here because my enlistment was possibly the last one.

I walk into the bunk and put my bags before sighing. This bunk is small, cramped, and filthy. You’d think it’d be clean for me and my bunkmates, but it wasn’t. In fact, it looks like someone else has been living here.

I hear screws turning deeper into the bunk and continue onwards. Soon, I find a man about my age tinkering with, what appears to be, a Gen-3 shotgun at a desk.

“Hello?” I say. The man perks like a rabbit hearing something with its wild ears, and turns around with a pair of steampunk looking glasses covering his face. He stares at me at first before a wicked smile plasters itself over his face and rises from his desk.

“You must be my new bunkmate!”  He says as he skillfully maneuvers his way towards me and over the filth, clothes, and trash that cover our floor. He extends his hand politlely. “The name’s Henry Tremor! Nice to meet you.”

My eyes widened at the name. “Tremor?” I ask in disbelief. “As in, one of the most powerful families in the entire galaxy?”

“Yea…” He softly whispers self consciously. “Don’t think about my name too much, okay? I’m here to fight just like you.”

“Yea, but why?” I ask “You can be up in the tallest tower with anything you want. I’d never leave.”

Henry looks over at a book on his desk, and glares at it. “Yea, a lot of people wouldn’t.” I want to question him about the book, but nothing comes out of my mouth when he turns back towards me. “So, what’s your name?”

“Uhm- Ela Williams.” I say. I look around the room with apprehensive eyes, and he must’ve noticed because he laughs nervously and scratches his dirty, curly black hair.

“Yeah, I kinda got lost in my work.” He says shyly. “Hey! I guess this will be our first mission together, cleaning up our bunks before inspection.”

I force out a laugh, even though I want to strangle him right now, and start immediately in cleaning while he retreats deeper into the filth to try and move that shotgun he was tinkering with earlier to a more secure spot. It takes almost all day to scrub the floor clean of any more oil, and I learn a little bit more about my bunkmate.

Henry Tremor, the black sheep of his family. He didn’t really like his two brothers because they’re total sticks in the mud, he didn’t like his father because he is borderline abusive, and his mom is basically just a mannequin that sits in a chair looking out the window. I ask more questions about how it’s like to live on Sectra, and he replies that he mainly lives on Uland of all places! I ask him why, and he responds with “It feels more real. Like I’m not expected to be anything except myself”.

I understand what he means, kind of. Whenever I’m with Ellie it feels like she’ll accept me for whoever I am. It makes me feel like a person who can actually fail and make mistakes. It feels real.

I ask him some more about the Tremors and he tells me their family has laws that all of them have to follow. They call them the Tremor Doctrine.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” I say while I sit on my bunk in my pajamas, ready for the night. Henry sits across the room from me and is sitting up on his bunk tinkering with the same shotgun from earlier.

“No, I’m serious.” He says, while testing the trigger. “We have to kill any enemies to the Tremor name, one Tremor has to be in every sector, no dating anyone who’s not rich, no having insects as pets, and no speaking spanish.” I raise my eyebrow at the last one. “It’s some weird family thing that happened in the past.”

“Sounds crazy. The only rule my family has is to survive.” I say.

“Well, you're gonna break that rule soon enough. We’re fighting those seven-foot tall monsters. I hear some of them can control freaking water!”

“Don’t be silly. That’s magic, magic doesn’t exist.” Henry looks at me, and a smile spreads across his face. “What?”

“I can do magic.” He says with a mischievous smile. I roll my eyes.

“What, can you make a rabbit disappear?” He chuckles before grabbing the shotgun he was working on and grabbing a satchel filled with orange glowing cylinders. He takes me by the hand and out to the back of our barrack.

When I get there, I see a set up of cardboard cutouts of humans of different shapes and sizes. Henry sets down the satchel, and grabs one of the glowing cylinders before loading it into a perfectly shaped opening into the shotgun and pumping the lever on the bottom of it.

“Wanna see me make all of this disappear?” I see him aim the shotgun, and for the first time I see something painted onto the side of it. A name. Akutan.

Henry pulls the trigger and a blast of bright, hot, red lava comes flying out of the barrel and cascades over all of the cardboard, melting it completely. I stare amazed as Henry laughs like a maniac.

I knew Gen-3 weapons were specially built to fire incendiary rounds that could burn down half a forest, but lava was impossible to fire as a bullet! How did he do that? How long has he been working on this shotgun? Does he notice the fire that’s spreading from the lava?

“Henry!” I call out, and he turns around and notices the quickly spreading flame.

“Uhh! What should we do?!” I look at the flames and notice how it’s already out of control, and grab him by the shoulder.

“We run!” I dash with him behind me as the flames grow out of control.

“Wait!” Kenny interrupts. “You just left a fire like that?!”

“Yes. What else were we supposed to do?” I shoot back.

After that whole fire accident was solved, Henry and I went through a lot of “corrective training” given to us by none other than Anna Averin. You should recognize that last name. She put us on cleaning duty for the next year we were there. Basic training in Safe Haven lasts about four years, so you can imagine how we felt when our first year there we were on toilet duty.

Anna was so insufferably noble, just like her son, that it drove me insane sometimes. She never told a lie and liars would be punished on the spot. Even the smallest of lies would invoke her wrath. Like the guy who said that he cleaned from underneath his bunk, and she threw him fifty yards after she found out that he lied.

She never let us out of her sight either. If we were cleaning the latrines, she was there with us. If we were in the firing range, she was out there out-shooting us by miles. When they told us we had the best senior officer in all of Haven, they weren’t kidding.

After that year, Anna did something that changed my life forever.

“The what?” I ask. Anna looks at me from behind her desk, and then to Henry.

“The Architect Division. It’s an experimental division focused on perfecting a piece of technology that could help us win the war.” She says. I wonder why I haven’t heard of this division. “It’s top secret, and nobody else can know about it.”

“Excuse me.” Henry says politely. “Why are we being moved to this division? We nearly burned down the whole camp.”

Anna smiles. “Because, comrade, nobody’s ever gone through the Arch and survived.” That silences and terrifies both of us to our cores. “But, I have a feeling you two will. You seem like fighters. Plus, a Williams and a Tremor? You two have genius in your blood. I know you’ll make it.”

I look at her, puzzled. “Wait. What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, Ela, your sister's work doesn’t go unnoticed.” Anna winks at me. Then, it clicks, Ellie must know Anna in some way. Somehow, her connection to Anna has granted me a death sentence. Or, maybe, she’s won me a chance to prove myself. To do what I always wanted to do since I got here. To show what a Williams can do.