Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

By the time I’ve cut myself loose from the seat straps, I can already see them, the headlights of their truck like eyes in the dark, and I can hear them shouting to one another, running, almost on us. I’m taking cover behind the engine, priming my rifle, aiming it—but somehow at the same moment, I’m also pulling Naoto from the wreck, and there’s so much blood, and I can’t tell whether it’s mine or his. “Danae,” he calls me—but I’m not her—but I am.

Only in this moment does it finally occur to me to turn my head, and when I do I’m already there, looking back: I’m seeing myself through my own other eyes. Because I have two bodies. Because I am both Alexei and Danae.

It’s too much. I can’t. My vision blurs. Four legs go slack under me. I feel myself start to faint.

And then

in the darkness that takes me

in a flood of images and sounds and sensations and

simply knowing things I should not be able to know

I begin to remember

everything.

ALEXEI

There must have been a time when I was a child huddling in the dark of a bunker; when I held hands with a girl named Eryn, and she gave me the only thing I’ve kept all these years, and we promised each other we’d live. I know these things happened, but it’s as if they’re part of another memory—something from before the beginning of me.

I know exactly where and when I begin.

“If you are here,” Major Malcolm Standard bellowed out over all of us, “you want to fight. That’s all I need to know about you.”

I stood in a rigid line with all the other children. The oldest of us could’ve been no older than twelve. Secretly, I was afraid I might be the youngest child in the room.

The Major continued, “Some part of each of you may be afraid that when the time comes, you won’t be mentally prepared to protect your Republic, your siblings in arms, and any family you may have, from certain enslavement by the Holy Western Confederacy. Any ordinary soldier experiences doubts of this variety, but you will not be ordinary soldiers. By virtue of your age and malleability, I will be able to mold you into an elite unit, profoundly hardened against the rigors of combat. Your mind will be clear and your aim steady. You will be immune to hesitation.”

We all flinched when he spoke. I don’t think any of us had ever heard a voice that loud.

“Today you will each be instructed in the basic operation of a wave rifle,” said the Major. “Tomorrow, each of you will take your first life.”

We stood still and kept our mouths shut. Looking back, I think none of us knew what to think about those words. We talked in the mess hall as if it had never been said. On some level we may even have doubted him—but at dawn we assembled into firing squads, and the prisoners were hauled out from the empty storehouse.

I remember everything about that moment. The weight of the wave rifle, pushing the limit of what my small arms could hold. The smell of sulfur in the air. The poles the prisoners were bound to cast such long shadows in the early light. They had no blindfolds. The Major told us all to aim, and when I first raised the rifle up and trained it on the spot directly between those first two eyes, I felt like I was choking on something. I snuck glances at the other kids in the line, and they snuck glances back, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to fire—

But in that moment, I remembered what had been in my mind when I’d left the orphanage for the barracks. I thought of Eryn. Missing. Lost. Dead. I felt the wire man hanging from my neck—and in that feeling, my hands steadied themselves. I touched the trigger and heard the fire order—and in the instant of that first irrevocable pop of electromagnetism, in the smell of ozone rolling down my hands, in the circle of cooked flesh in the dead center of an adult stranger’s forehead: that was the first moment in which I recognize myself in any of my memories.

The Major shouted for everyone to freeze. I tensed as he walked straight for me. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I looked up at him, not understanding, and then I realized all of this had only been meant as a lesson about hesitation. No one had been expected to obey the order the first time it was given. I alone had done it.

“Have you ever killed anyone before?” he asked.

“No.”

“What’s your name, cadet?”

“Alexei.”

“Your surname.”

I had no answer.

“Report to my office, cadet.”

I did as I was told, and that day my real training began.

“It’s come to my attention that many of you are still, nearly two weeks into basic training, harboring certain archaic misconceptions about warfare,” the Major bellowed down to the other kids. I stood at his side on the concrete ledge, overlooking their lines.

“Cadet one-niner-zero,” he shouted. “Step forward onto the range and fire at the target.”

Everyone stepped back from the boy I still knew only by number. He heaved his waver into firing position as elegantly as his young muscles would allow.

“Stop,” said the Major, before he’d even touched the trigger. “Everyone, observe. Who can point out his mistake?”

No one said a word.

“Alexei,” the Major shouted.

“He’s bracing himself, and he is tense, sir,” I shouted over the crowd, as loud as I could, as he’d taught me.

“Correct,” the Major yelled. “Although we call it a ‘rifle’ in concession to the colloquial use of that word to describe what is more aptly called a long gun, your Zaytsev SL-10 waver is not a projectile weapon! It does not have any recoil! If you tighten your grip in the moment you fire,