A Bloodred Sea

The platoon turns as one, their bloodred uniforms shining with starch in the pseudo-sun. The artificial lights high above flicker momentarily, then immediately return to their former unforgiving brightness. Nothing in the BARRACKS is permitted to be anything less than perfect, and even the lightbulbs appear momentarily abashed to have lapsed.

One soldier, at the head of one of the countless lines, glances quickly up at the lights and then back down again. No one else reacts, not even to dart her a side glance for breaking protocol.

She smooths her expression with practiced ease, unaware of the other outlier, who is watching her with narrowed eyes from across the BARRACKS. A glint of satisfaction appears momentarily before he, too, schools his face to be emotionless. As is expected.

The COMMANDER barks another order, and the ARMY begins their march.

Later, when the soldiers have returned and are standing fully clothed in a mass shower to have the blood and filth washed off them, the male soldier approaches the female.

"JANAE," he mutters, his lips barely moving. A GENERAL passes, and they both freeze for a few moments. Once he moves on, the boy—for he is barely more than seventeen years out of the test tube—continues. "You've been... off today."

She stiffens. She has, as a matter of fact, been feeling "off". When they took that village, laying waste to miles of crops and ripping screaming children from their fathers, she felt something in the pit of her stomach that had never been there before. But he shouldn't have noticed that. None of them have been trained or programmed to notice anything like that. Nor to approach each other in the showers—and yet, here he is.

"I don't know what you're talking about, MAKAI," she says, then mentally curses herself. She's made a mistake. Using his name was unnecessary, and superfluous language is another thing they were not programmed to do. Now he knows something's wrong.

MAKAI nods seriously, but she can sense an edge of amusement behind his expression. "Of course you don't. And neither do I. Because we're not expected to know anything other than this life, and we're not supposed to know anything other than this life. So, how about you meet me outside the dorm and we can bond over our collective ignorance?"

She stares at him. "What are you talking about?" Is he mocking her? Her face is heating up. It feels like battle rage. Is it battle rage? Oh no; she'll get in so much trouble if she succumbs to the rage in the shower rooms. This has never happened before; she was always the model soldier. And why is her internal monologue all over the place? What is happening to her?

MAKAI appears to consider trying to explain further, then sighs. A sudden soberness crosses his face, eclipsing even the short glimpse of mischief JANAE caught. "Outside the dorm. Tonight," he repeats. He touches her arm briefly and slips away, rejoining the formation.

She stares down at her sopping wet uniform when he touched it. Her skin tingles beneath the scarlet fabric.

Soldiers only touch when absolutely necessary. What is happening?

The showers abruptly shut off, leaving her dripping and caught off-guard. When the formation immediately begins marching again, she trips when she tries to match pace with them and ends up off-beat.

"The supplements," MAKAI whispers. "The drugs are in the 'vitamin supplements' they give us with our gruel every night."

JANAE blinks at him. "I still don't understand. What you're saying is that they give us a substance of some sort to make our brains work less? How does that make sense? We need to be perfect for the battles."

He rubs a hand down his face. "It's only a specific part of the brain that the drugs shut down. It's the part that feels emotions; that forms attachments."

"Emotions?" JANAE repeats. She's never heard the word, although it feels familiar. Perhaps she learned it in PRIMARY, where they were permitted to break protocol slightly more—and where, come to think of it, the food tasted a lot better and had no "vitamin supplements"—but come SECONDARY and TERTIARY any such ideas were struck from the curriculum.

It hadn't been difficult to sneak out of the BARRACKS and meet him; the stealth soldiers were taught from conception now worked against their creators. Now they're sitting close together in the small, dark room MAKAI has led her to. Their knees are almost touching, the bloodred fabric brushing softly. She's trying her utmost to keep them from touching, and that simple fact is mystifying to her. The soldiers touch all the time while on the HELI transports to battle sites. Yet she refuses to let her legs touch his. She doesn't want to feel that spark again she felt in the showers. But oh, she also does. It's so strange. There's desire, such desire, yet she knows intrinsically that to allow such a thing would be dangerous. More dangerous than any battle.

"Emotions," MAKAI repeats. "They're like... feelings."

She tries to understand. "Like pain?"

He laughs softly. "I suppose. In some ways."

"Then why would they be desirable? Why are you speaking like their destruction is a bad thing? Pain is weakness."

"Janae," he says softly, and somehow it's intimate. No one has ever said her name like that before. She looks at his eyes, shining like a cat's in the dark, and realizes he feels the same way about her as she does about him. His gaze traces across her face like a feather: slanted eyes, full lips, and thick eyebrows to match his. A blend of the genetics of conquered nations—nations they now help conquer. Strange, how she suddenly hates that. The soldiers are the sons and daughters of the people they kill daily. Strange, how she wishes things could change.

How she wishes they could change. Wishes there was some way to always be connected with this strange, tenebrous gossamer thread.

"Pain isn't weakness," he tells her. "It's human."

She's on her feet before she can think, nearly hitting her head on the ceiling. "No. Makai. No. We are not human. We were designed to be killing machines."

"And yet," he says softly. She realizes there are tears on his cheeks.

They aren't engineered to cry. This can't be happening. Her heart is pounding painfully in her chest, and it isn't from exertion. If this is emotion, she wants it to end.

A sudden realization hits her. "You're that one. The one who left. No one ever says your name in the stories..."

"Because they don't want you to know I'm still here," MAKAI says softly.

"They said you went mad." After he'd disappeared from the battlefield and turned up weeks later inside a cottage, living a human life with a human woman from one of the now-conquered kingdoms, as if she were his own mother. She shoves down the sudden pang of desire she feels at the thought. Living in a cottage, with just him...

"No," he whispers. "I went sane. I went without my vitamin supplements for those months, and everything changed."

"That's what you did to me," she says suddenly. "You somehow prevented the vitamins from being added to my gruel this morning."

He gives her a lopsided smirk, his old humor peeking through once again. "Bloody difficult, too. And yet you don't seem to appreciate my efforts at all."

She stands without another word and leaves the tiny, dark storage closet, where her perfectly designed body and perfectly balanced emotions are no longer perfect. Where there's weakness; terrifying, wonderful weakness burning with a ruby flame to match her standard-issue ARMY slacks.

She comes back within the week.

Of course she does. Some terrible curiosity—another thing they've always been taught to ward off—pulls her out of her sleeping pod almost without her consent to return to the closet, where he always sits waiting. As if he knew she would return all along. Some part of her is annoyed by that. Another is thrilled.

Emotions. An inconvenient addiction, is how she thinks of it. Such weakness, and yet such incredible highs. It's why she hasn't turned Makai in. The comfortable vitamin-induced numbness still hasn't returned, so she has to assume Makai found a way to hack the computers that calculate exact portion and nutrition needs for every one of the soldiers based on weight and muscle mass.

Another reason she hasn't turned Makai in is the talks they have each night, faces close in the dark closet—he's told her that it's the only spot devoid of security cameras, a forgotten janitor's closet full of cleaning chemicals now rendered obsolete by improved UV surface sanitation technology—speaking softly of anything that comes to mind. What they feel now that their neural chemistry hasn't been altered by the vitamins, what they would do if they could leave, what it had been like for Makai to live with the older woman who cared for him while he was MIA.

"Love," he murmurs one night. "She told me about it. She said it was the hardest emotion to explain, the one with the most self-contradictory nature. I think I know what it means now. I think I felt it for her."

He falls silent for a moment, then continues in a near-monotone, "They burned her cottage down. I was there when they knocked her head off her shoulders. I watched the blood spread across her white shift... I didn't eat for weeks after they took me back. That's how I realized it was the food that was suppressing our emotions. Suppressing our identities."

Janae isn't sure what to do. Isn't even quite sure what he means. Without exactly knowing why, she reaches out and touches the side of his face. He shivers.

"Love," she repeats, feeling the consonants roll off her tongue and buzz between her teeth. "Tell me more."

Janae gazes at the ceiling through the softly glowing gel of her sleep-pod, her stomach churning. 

It's been a very difficult day.

The raidings of the villages have been difficult since the day she began to feel, but this one was especially bad. There was a boy, about her age. She can't get his image out of her head. His mother was sliced in half by one of her platoon-mates' microfilament blades, and he screamed and screamed. She kept seeing Makai in his place, ripped away from the beautiful, simple new life he'd found with the village woman; watching her body fly in one direction and her head fly in the other.

It's hard. It's so hard.

She's been struggling with this for months now, but tonight is the night her weakness will overcome her strength.

She'll tell a COMMANDER. She won't turn Makai in, but she'll tell one of her superiors that the computer has stopped giving her sufficient vitamins for the past few days. No need to mention the months of agony, of emotions roiling under her skin hour after hour. She'll just tell them, they'll fix the computers to give her her vitamin supplements again, and she'll be comfortably numb once more within hours of her next meal.

The soldiers of the ARMY are not permitted attachments.

They must always be willing to sacrifice their fellows for the greater good.

This will make her a more effective soldier. For the greater good of the EMPIRE.

Love is weakness, Janae—no, JANAE—tells herself. Love is weakness.

She rolls out of the pod, its goo sloughing off of her, and pads out into the hallway toward the officers' quarters. The ARMY operates day and night, the sieges never stopping, so naturally the officers are available day and night.

When she makes it to the officers' quarters, though, she's surprised to see a familiar figure standing in front of the enormous desk.

She freezes in the doorway.

Makai.

"Good of you to join us, JANAE-26," an icy voice from behind the desk says. "We were just speaking of you."

Makai whirls around, and she sees the shackles securing his wrists to one another.

Her mind races. Continue with her original plan and confess? Or side with Makai? There's still a chance for redemption here, if she tells the COMMANDER she wants to be numb again; renounces any relationship with Makai.

But oh, it's so much harder to think that way when he's right there.

"I'm disappointed, JANAE," the officer says. "You were one of our top operatives. You went through all the same training as the rest. Attachments are weakness. Emotion is weakness."

"Emotion," Makai says in a voice permeated with perfectly trained ARMY permafrost, "is strength."

He locks eyes with Janae, pokerfaced. Your move. He knows exactly what she was planning. And now he's giving her a chance for forgiveness.

She makes her decision. "Love," she says in a quiet clear voice, and is gratified to see the COMMANDER flinch at hearing a word most definitely not in PRIMARY vocabulary, "is strength."

Makai grins at her, and his whole face lights up. He turns back around to address the officer. "What you said about Janae being one of your best soldiers? I've seen her fight. It's true. And we're both going to kick your ass, you desk monkey."

Most of those words mean absolutely nothing to Janae, but she glows anyway.

Love is strength.

Love is standing together against the world, is creating an isthmus between landmasses in a sea of lone islands, and staying united even if there's no chance of coming out on top.

She glows—until a microfilament-tipped spear flies past her head and stabs straight through Makai's shoulder.

When she turns, she's faced with row after row of perfect red uniforms. The night shift. 17 platoons, having come back from a round of pillaging only to be diverted to deal with her and Makai.

Glancing back, Janae sees that the COMMANDER is gone; probably slipped through a back door somewhere. The middle of a battlefield of ARMY soldiers is not a good place to be for someone accustomed to being at the desk. Makai has yanked the spear out of his shoulder and is expertly using his teeth to tie off a strip of fabric ripped from his sleeve and staunch the bleeding. She takes slow steps backward away from the door until she's even with him.

"I was lying, you know," he confides. "I've never actually seen you fight, but I'd love to. You think 17 angry platoons of night-shifters who want to be in bed is a good place to start?"

She can't help the smile that creeps onto her lips. They have no chance, but she finds herself studying the layout of the room; the door that will prevent more than two attackers from entering at a time. A tactical advantage, to be sure.

They clasp hands and raise their weaponless fists.

Someone shouts an order and the soldiers crash down on them in a wave of bloodred.