Rising Tomorrow (Roc de Chere Book 1) by Mariana Morgan (essential reading txt) 📕

supervising their training. They weren’t wearing military uniforms; in fact, they weren’t wearing anything that could even remotely resemble a uniform of any kind, and to Ingram, they looked rather oddly out of place. The random selection of plain clothes in various colours was almost jarring.

The… trainees—Ingram wasn’t even sure what to call them—were scattered around the course as if they had all started at different times, showing varying levels of motivation and competence. They either didn’t much care about their results or they were completely intoxicated with nano-hallucinogens, or nano-psychotropes, referred to as nano-hells by those on the receiving end.

The nano-hells were a wide group of mind-altering drugs. In the right concentrations, a nano-hell cocktail could induce anything from mild suggestibility to a full-blown hallucination that would put LSD or psychedelic mushrooms to shame.

Ingram had seen the effects of nano-hells too often not to recognise their effects. The out-of-balance, zombie-like shuffles and vacant eyes, clearly noticeable among the assault course trainees, were a dead giveaway. She focused on a man about to climb a rope, and had just started walking towards him for a closer look when a commotion on the other side of the field attracted her attention.

One of the instructors was at the base of a vertically suspended net, and one of the participants—Ingram didn’t like that word either, but she had to choose something to refer to them—was climbing it. Originally it would have been called a confidence obstacle, though by the end of the 27th century it bore little resemblance to its original use. The frequent use of nano-hells made it more of a torture obstacle.

A nano-hell cocktail could induce susceptibility to all sorts of phobias, playing with the perceived fear and multiplying it to unmanageable and deeply irrational proportions. There were techniques one could use to resist the effect of the drugs, but resisting wasn’t the same as neutralising. And if someone already happened to have a phobia, however small, the nano-hells could wreak absolute havoc.

Ingram winced, remembering one of her friends, a fellow recruit with a paralysing fear of heights who otherwise showed tremendous potential. Somehow, he seemed to have been getting on top of his weakness… until the nano-hells kicked in. He had been on the very same net, in the very same VRP, nearly at the top when the drugs had activated. First he had frozen; then the shaking had begun. Eventually, his muscles, exhausted from gripping too tight, had given up. The n-suits had been programmed to prevent instant death, but the ground had shaken when he slammed into it. His scream died abruptly as he was unplugged from the VRP. They never saw him again.

Acrophobia, an irrational fear of heights, had claimed many victims over the centuries. Nano-drug–supported therapy in the hands of a decent mind healer could quite effectively alleviate the problem, sometimes even eliminate it entirely, but the Freedom Wars’ appetite for human cannon fodder meant no one gave Leech recruits the time for such luxuries. If you couldn’t deal with something by yourself, the fear and the nano-hells would take care of you instead. Painfully.

And there were always more recruits to take your place.

The scene currently replaying itself in front of Gonzalez, Eloise and Ingram looked disturbingly similar. They were still too far away to hear the individual words, but the instructor was clearly yelling at the person barely a quarter of the way up the net. The participant was dressed in a maroon tee with blue trousers, and even at a distance they could see his body shaking from a combination of exhaustion and fear. He was too terrified to make a decision. He was possibly stricken with a natural case of bad acrophobia, but Ingram doubted it. Why wait for something to occur naturally if you can induce it artificially and be done culling the weak?

Closer, it wasn’t difficult to see his hands gripping the rope so hard his white knuckles looked like they were about to pop. Just a couple of metres up—no big deal, right? So trivial to some, but a real monster with claws to others. It wasn’t logical. It couldn’t be rationalised. It often didn’t even matter how far from the ground someone was. The fear was so overwhelming, the nano-hells making it a gazillion times worse, that it was just a matter of time before it claimed your sanity.

Ingram wrinkled her nose as the acrid smell enveloped her. She could see the blue trousers staining a darker shade of blue, and the man on the net seemed to be shrinking in embarrassment. For a moment, the humiliation was stronger than the fear of heights, but then the shaking came back, stronger, as the full effect of his weakness overcame him.

There was no way to know, but his loss of bodily functions might have been caused by the nano-drugs as well. Or maybe not, maybe it was natural, a reaction to absolute, sheer panic.

The instructor was yelling harder now, telling the man to haul his worthless ass up. Threatening, promising violence and worse. Pointing out the stench of urine, the weakness, the pathetic effort. The man didn’t seem to be in a state to understand anything, whether it was spoken in a soft whisper or a shout. Nothing was penetrating the panic.

Despite all the nastiness, the instructor seemed detached, almost disinterested, and Ingram wondered if he was drugged as well, made more vicious and uncaring by a different nano-cocktail. The man shaking up on the net must have been a Leech; Elites didn’t talk to each other like that. Not quite like that, not even in the military.

Something stirred inside Ingram. Memories of the helplessness, the unfairness, came crashing in. Thoughts she had assumed she had left in the past. She couldn’t change it back then so she had buried the memories deep, but now they resurfaced. Maybe it was really self-directed anger over having done nothing. Maybe it was shame at how scared she had been. Logically, she knew