CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Seed of Rebellion

Since we hadn’t arrived in time for the rendezvous, the rest of Wolf Squad had come looking for us. Although, as I watched them carry Private Jenkins off on a stretcher — his body covered in a white sheet while his lifeless arm dangled from the side — I wished they’d arrived sooner or that we’d made the effort to double back and get reinforcements before pushing into the laboratory. Yeah, the regrets always arrived after things turned to shit.

“You okay, Number One?” our pixie-haired squad medic, Jana Jansen, asked just before she stuck a needle into my arm.

I grimaced. “I’m fine… thanks.”

A shot of adrenaline was all she’d given me to help me stave off the fatigue that threatened to overwhelm my body.

“Maybe try not to abuse unrefined arcanite next time,” Jana said while she applied a bandage over the injection point. “You’re lucky this is all you need. I know arcanists who’ve burned up from the inside-out because they couldn’t handle the raw energies arcanite stores up…”

“Seriously?” I raised an eyebrow at her. “Are we talking high fever or actual spontaneous human combustion?”

“The latter,” she said while she packed her first-aid kit. “You’re really lucky, kiddo.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I answered, although I assumed that I managed to control the power pretty easily because I’d already trained my body to harness huge amounts of natural energy. “Um, thanks… I’ll be okay now.”

Jana eyed me warily. Not in that you-are-a-freak kind of way that I usually get from adults, but more out of surprise that I’d come out of this life-and-death encounter relatively unscathed.

It was true though. When I’d used the arcanite’s power to boost my body’s natural abilities, I’d also unconsciously enhanced my healing factor, too. And now I didn’t even have a single scar to show off to Number Five when I return to the institute.

Man, he’ll never believe I went toe to toe with a fiend!

“You really didn’t know that arcanite could heal you?” she confirmed.

I shook my head. “I knew we used it in medicine, but healing magic’s the stuff of fairy tales, isn’t it?”

Jana’s slanted eyes got narrower when her face turned contemplative. “Actual healing magic might be a stretch, but liquid arcanite’s the main component in the medi-tonic we use on the field to treat injuries.”

“I’d learned about first-aid measures like medi-tonic in my Survival 101 class. It was an all-purpose potion that worked as an anesthetic, clotting agent, and anti-biotic. But I only learned now that this wonder drug was also powered by arcanite.

Is there anything that miracle mineral can’t do?

“Major’s calling for you, Number One,” Jana said in her perky, high-pitched voice.

“Okay,” I said as I got up from the seat she’d forced me into earlier. “Um, thanks again for the help.”

As I made my way over to where the major was waiting for me, I passed by Sergeant Jager and Lieutenant Spiers. The sergeant had his arm around the lieutenant so she could help him walk, and I guessed that was the reason his cheeks were so red.

“There’s no need to coddle me, ma’am,” Sergeant Jager growled. “I can still walk. Same can’t be said for Jenkins.”

“I assume he died bravely?” Lieutenant Spiers asked.

That’s when Sergeant Jager noticed me close by. We shared a look where I tried to reassure him that I would back whatever he wanted to say because I figured he wouldn’t want to admit how lamely Private Jenkins had died. I guessed right.

“Yeah, we couldn’t have beaten that thing without him,” Sergeant Jager reported.

Lieutenant Spiers eyed Sergeant Jager with skepticism. It was a look she passed over to me when she saw me.

“You think so too?” she asked.

I nodded wordlessly as I couldn’t trust myself to lie in front of this woman’s scrutinizing gaze.

“So, Jenkins saved your asses without once firing his rifle, huh,” Lieutenant Spiers commented.

Oh, no…

I’d completely forgotten that Lieutenant Spiers trained all the recruits so she was probably aware of what Jenkins was really like.

“His bullets are all accounted for,” she explained.

“Listen, Lieutenant—”

“It’s fine, sarge,” she said, sighing. “He died in the line of duty. That’ll at least ensure his mother gets compensation for her loss… assuming Jenkins signed his insurance policy.”

Sergeant Jager let out an even longer sigh than she did. “Shit… it would be just like that scatterbrain if he didn’t… We can’t help with this, can we?”

Even as they discussed this, Sergeant Jager was trying to extricate himself from the lieutenant’s side, but she held him tightly in her grasp.

“Stop fidgeting around, dumbass… you’re too injured to walk on your own,” she snapped.

I watched this grown-ass man with the brown afro wilt under the glower of a woman who was a head shorter than he was, and now I knew why Lieutenant Spiers was Major Wolf’s number two.

“As for Jenkins,” her gaze, which had quickly morphed into a softer one, drifted to me before resting back on the sarge, “the major will make sure he didn’t die in vain.”

As she began to half-drag Sergeant Jager out of this hell hole we were in — because he insisted earlier that he didn’t need a stretcher — Lieutenant Spiers gave me a pat on the shoulder, one that was warm and welcoming and not at all what I usually got from the adults who feared me.

“You know, Sarge, I think your injuries qualify you for a Maroon Heart,” she said as they walked by. “Congrats.”

“Don’t need it,” he grumbled as he glanced over his shoulder to give me an approving nod, “the major’s kid did more than me… he’s going to turn out just like Wolf.”

“Isn’t that a scary thought?” Lieutenant Spiers chuckled. Then she too glanced over her shoulder to remind me, “Don’t keep him waiting, Number One.”

From what I learned in Military Etiquette class back at the institute, the Maroon Heart was a medal given to a soldier who’d been gravely injured in the line of duty. I wouldn’t be getting one, obviously, but I didn’t need one. It was enough that both Sergeant Jager and Lieutenant Spiers seemed to be warming up to me. And that feeling of acceptance was worth more than any medal to an orphan like me.

I found the major by the table where I’d first read that insidious journal. He was looking over it now, and with the way his eyes were narrowed, I guessed he was just as repulsed by its contents as I had been.

“You read this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you understand it?”

“Mostly… but there were a few bits I couldn’t get my head wrapped around.”

Major Wolf glanced away from the journal to look at me. “Anything in particular?”

I moved closer to the table and flipped the pages of the journal over to where I’d seen the disturbing drawings. “There’s this line here about deifacted arcanite… I’m not sure what that means, sir.”

Both our gazes turned to the dark blue pebble someone had picked up and placed on the table. With its ethereal glow gone, the arcanite looked like it was just a paperweight.

“No, that’s just an unrefined arcanite ore,” Major Wolf explained. “Deifacted arcanite is something else entirely.”

“Um, what is it?” I asked.

My master shook his head. “You’re not ready to learn that, kiddo. Maybe someday when you’re older.”

It was rare for Major Wolf to brush off one of my inquiries as it was his policy to teach me everything that might help keep me alive long enough to see adulthood. The only time he didn’t give me a straight answer was when the question involved something extra-dangerous, which I guessed this deifacted arcanite was. I would have to find my answer somewhere else, and so I resolved to visit the institute’s research library when I got back as I didn’t like not knowing something.

“Is that all you didn’t understand?” he asked, eyeing me coolly.

I knew what he was getting at, of course. He wanted to know if I understood the implications written in that journal. Most likely the part where we had a traitor inside the institute. Someone monstrous enough to employ such cruel tactics to achieve their inhuman goals.

“Yes…” My brow creased. “What are we going to do about it, Master?”

His brow creased too. We were in sync like that.

“I’ll make inquiries, but we’ll keep this between you and me for now. We don’t want to alert the perpetrator until we know who they are.”

He gave me a stern look, one that never really worked on me before, because, technically, I was older than he was.

“You can’t tell Number Three either, got it?”

I nodded. Then I frowned.

“Where is Three?” I asked.

“She’s down in the alley icing the corpse up so we can transport it without contaminating the body,” Major Wolf answered. And after he noticed my worried look, he added, “Allers and Brandt are down there with her to keep Number Three out of trouble.”

“That thing…” I glanced down at my feet. “…it was desperate to live even though—”

“It had already become a monster,” Major Wolf finished for me. “The will to live… it’s probably why the child survived the experiments done to her.”

I looked up from the floor. “Her?”

Major Wolf tapped the open journal lying on the table. “If you really want to know, the answer’s in here.”

It took me a long moment to sort out my thoughts, but I shook my head in the end. Whether or not this girl was someone I’d known was one question I didn’t want to know the answer to. Because I didn’t want to be angrier than I already felt. I didn’t want hate to be my driving force.

“Hey, master, why are the other adults in that place so cruel to us?” I asked after a while.

Major Wolf’s face turned grave. “Because they think that the best way to motivate you kids is through fear and suffering.”

“That’s what General Hauser claimed… but shouldn’t they give us a cookie once in a while too?”

“When you’re old enough that you can’t just be pushed around so easily then sure.”

“Why not now? Wouldn’t that make us more compliant?” I placed my hand inside my pocket because I didn’t want Major Wolf seeing me ball it into a fist. “Aren’t they worried that if they keep pushing us around we’ll eventually want to rebel?”

“That’s not likely to happen… Have you looked at your friends recently?” Major Wolf closed the journal and then shoved it into his pack. “Do any of them look like they have the will to rebel?”

Then he grinned.

“Apart from you and Number Three, that is.”

“That’s not a fair comparison,” I complained. “The others don’t get the opportunities Number Three and I have with you.”

“But they’ve been getting more and more privileges, too,” Major Wolf reminded me. “At least those kids willing to comply with the demands of the institute haven’t had as bad a time as the ones that don’t.”

He laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

“The truth is, they don’t want you to be happy. Happy kids think they can do anything. And the older you get, the more experiences you accumulate, and the more the seeds of rebellion might grow in you because you’re not suffering enough.” Major Wolf sighed. “Now’s the only time they can instill that deep-seethed fear into you kids so that you will want to be loyal to the fatherland to never again experience that kind of suffering.”

As an afterthought, he added, “Having you afraid now will just make programming you kids into compliant adults easier.”

Man, that’s just diabolical… My eyes narrowed. “It’s not working on me though.”

“Isn’t it?”

My master gave me that look that suggested I might be lying to myself.

“You mean Number Three, don’t you?”

“Not just her. All of them,” he said. “I’m not sure why you feel responsible for your friends, acting like their older brother and all. Although that’s not a bad thing. However, the colonel has noticed this quirk about you, too. And he knows that the way to get to you…”

“…Is to keep everyone else on a tight leash. My compliance for their lives.”

“That's right, kiddo.”

Major Wolf wrapped his arms around me like a father might have done for his son. Only, we weren’t father and son, even though I would have loved for that to be true.

“You’re a good kid. And I will do my absolute best to make sure that they don’t beat that out of you.”

“They won’t.”

I wasn’t sure where that confidence had come from. Only that I wasn’t going to sell my soul to the colonel and his dreams of a perfect arcane soldier. A time would come for a reckoning, and I promised myself that I would be the one to pull that trigger when the moment arrived.

Strangely enough, as Major Wolf moved on from the table to supervise the clean-up of the laboratory, an opportunity to increase my potential arsenal appeared before me. It arrived in the form of a tome that had been among the pile of books on that same table. A casual glance at this pile, and my eyes lit up like Christmas had come early.

Potions and Tonics for the Aberrant Mind were scrawled on the cracked leather spine of this thin volume that was about the size of a standard bible. The name plucked a chord in my mind because I’d heard of it before in our Introduction to Alchemy class.

“By the all-father...” I breathed. “...is this really that book?”

Professor Schmidt, the researcher who taught that class, once spoke of a lost grimoire that had been written by the sorcerers of the Alchemical College of Fire County almost a hundred years ago. In this tome was a detailed list of experimental concoctions that had been quickly banned by the state because they were, as Professor Schmidt called them, “An arcane attempt to create the perfect man,” and I knew perfectly well how the state reacted to things they couldn’t control.

What that ‘Perfect Man’ meant, Professor Schmidt didn’t explain. But, as I gave this damn lab one more sweeping gaze, I could easily guess where this theory's direction veered into. It wasn’t just about fiendish experimentations, but something more superhuman in nature. And if my guess was right then this book I’d found out of sheer luck might prove the boon I needed to change the status quo.

With zero hesitation, I plucked it from the pile and shoved it into my pack. While in my head I wondered just what sort of amazing secrets I was about to uncover.