The Water Sign

First Lesson: You Have to Fight

First Lesson:

YOU HAVE TO FIGHT 

“Unlike Greek or Norse beliefs, which suggested that Gods could be cunning, violent, and unpredictable, the Abrahamic religions suggested a righteous God: each is founded upon the dogma that only its God can know what is best for humanity. Like all successful religions, they are designed to curb our potential, deny our Aspects, and bring about our final, total slavery to the Elohim.”

—Survival of Doctrine, The Aspect Claria

I never reached Paris. A squad of upperclassmen kidnapped me before I could die in the desert. The only thing I can recall from our flight into the Caucasus was the obscenity of the Caspian Sea reflecting outside the window, huge and unfathomable. I think that was the first time I stopped crying.

Water. That remains and little else.

Of the next seven years I have only fragments. Most of my memories were lost or suppressed by the brutality of our conditioning and our being “born again” into Midas’s great dogma, the cult of the Aspect Claria.

The chill and terror of the first few months of solitary confinement. The first time I was beaten by a superior officer. (The teachers never touched us.) Trained in immersia simulations, killing each other in a sensory illusion of the battlefield. Hatred. Mathematics. Greek myths. Martial arts. Memorizing Midas’s writings. Firing my first live weapon. With enough repetition and indoctrination, these became normal and some of them even turned fun. I could enjoy myself in the virtual battlefield, shooting toy soldiers in our war games. It turned out I was a natural warrior. I excelled at fighting.

None of this has a particularly clear quality to me except as it is indicative of a larger truth, of the machine I was forged within, the routines Midas refined as a means of turning children into soldiers. He took in the natural survivors—the pickpockets and the fighters—ones like me, who could survive the open desert for days on end. Then, through games, lessons, and punishments, he sculpted us. It was almost like a normal school. From the reprogramming and numbing, I emerged as intended: another dutiful little warrior, honor- bound and ready to give my life for the Great Struggle. We were primed to do anything to defeat the Elohim.

Still, a part of me from the desert remained underneath: my oath and my adoration of the other gender. It was my hidden self. I wanted to be cunning and strong like the women in the Sisters’ stories. Though I no longer believed in the prophet, Elektra’s image still burned in my mind as the ideal warrior. Noble, patient, powerful and fearless. Midas could teach the qualities of a soldier. But they were all still deeply feminine to me. So I kept my hair long and I stuck with the girls in my class, afraid to be contaminated by the weakness I saw in all males. I demanded to be with the girls—training, eating at the mess, bunking—it didn’t matter. Girls were the only ones I trusted. The only ones I respected. For a while anyway.

Midas encouraged competition between the sexes to strengthen the emergence of our Aspects. So at first, when my behavior only amused the girls, they accepted me on their team; as my misgivings about manhood became clear, I was labeled “disordered.” A problem student. Stuck in false ideology. Elohim-contaminated. Practically a traitor for these unapproved thoughts. Then neither side wanted me.

I was an outcast. Constantly in trouble with the discipline committee. Always getting into fights with the other boys. Bruises were my camouflage. There were times when I forgot what I looked like without something bandaged or swelling.

Growing up in the lowerschool could be hard. The teachers and the upperclassmen didn’t go easy on us for our age. Pain was part of the learning process. But I brought even more of it on myself. I couldn’t let go of what I’d seen in the desert, and I lashed out at the other boys to make them pay for crimes they hadn’t committed.

I told myself they deserved it. I told myself I’d show them all one day. That was how I passed those strange and miserable seven years. They floated by. And then, one day, I finally ran out of time.

***

At fourteen, I hadn’t proved them wrong. Everyone in the class had developed their Aspect, some more than others, but everyone to some degree. The earliest, like our captain, Lilith, had started at age ten. The latest, at thirteen.

And then there was me. Stuck at zero. No Aspect at all. As if there weren’t already enough reasons to pick on me. I was at the bottom of the class, the entire school actually, so far down I had gone on to define a new bottom, a last place beyond all measure. I was setting the record for failure. I could shoot as well as anyone. My tactical sense was almost as good as Lilith’s. And I was a prodigy with the Tacticus Corporealis, our hand-to-hand training. I had to be. There was no other way to protect myself from all the enemies I’d made. But an Aspect is defined by one thing more than any of these: her Aspect.

In school history, the most latent Aspect ever recorded had shown nine months into her thirteenth year. Cassandra. (She was a teacher now.)

I was three months into my fourteenth year.

Out of time.

Because today was Graduation Day: our first real combat mission. No more immersia games.

We were headed to Former Tibet to fight alongside the Buddhist rebellion, the longest running, most deadly war in history. Without an Aspect to defend me, it was a near certainty I was going to be killed.

There were only two real chances I might survive our inaugural mission. The first was named Hela. The second, Lilith.

Lilith believed in what we died for. Hela only wanted to and never could.