Subordinance

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

“Wait!” I call, the girl stopping in her tracks. I jog towards her, still a bit on the awestruck side in her ability to navigate the labyrinth so quickly and in such confidence that she knew where she was going.

She smiles at me, her eyes holding somewhat of a knowing light in them. She flicks her thick plait of umber-colored strands over her shoulder, her hair much longer than Second Army regulation requires. The way in which this girl holds herself suggests that this ability she possesses that is so shocking to me is nothing more than routine for her. Next to her, I feel dwarfed and sheepish in almost being ambushed while in the labyrinth.

“Yes?” she replies, and I gape; a second before I’d had a million ideas on the verge of being spoken and now I was coming up empty.

“How did you do that?” I finally ask lamely, my eyebrows still knit in awe. She straightens her back and rights her shoulders, lifting her chin and raising her brow, looking down on me over the bridge of her nose.

“Some are just better than others.” While she inspects her nails I’m left floundering for a reply to her statement, once again grasping at nothing. After an awkward moment of watching my jaw flap open and shut, she drops the expression and snorts. “I’m kidding!”

“Oh,” is all I say, my cheeks coloring scarlet. She hits my shoulder with the flat of her hand, shaking her head.

“C’mon, I was just messing with you. But really, I train in the labyrinth on my free days off. I know every kink and curve of this place.” She slaps one of the steel walls encompassing the maze’s center for emphasis. The labyrinth’s center is really no more than the open space in the center of the maze with an elevator shaft in the middle that takes Subordinates back up to the main floor of the Dome Complex, since the labyrinth is underground. The shaft rattles loudly in the silence of the maze, a dull thump and muted ding signaling its arrival.

“You up for lunch?” she queries, turning to me and nodding her head in the direction of the elevator. I nod, my stomach growling in agreement; I pray that lunch is better than the stewed ration meal we had for breakfast. Entering the elevator, I am aware in the quiet of the maze the sound of bullets being fired and the subsequent startled screams; the scrape of metal against concrete as dummies fall; sometimes the muted thump of flesh against the ground.

“First,” she says plainly, albeit somewhat proudly. In doing so, she breaks the uncomfortable blanket of silence that had shrouded the elevator in the midst of the rattling sound of metal-on-metal. “We came in first.”

My mental train of thoughts comes to a screeching halt like her words were a mountain I couldn’t go through. “We came in first?” The elite Subordinates came in first, the ones who would go on to become Sector Leaders and war heroes. The soldiers that would be worth something in the eyes of Delta, worth more than the set of numbers tagged to our foreheads that label us expendable in the eyes of everyone around us.

Not the anonymous ninth Subordinate who can barely navigate her way around the Quadrant Wing.

“Like I said, you’re welcome.” Her response leaves me wanting more; in judging her character in the short time I’ve known her, she doesn’t exactly strike me as the warm-and-fuzzy kind of girl that helps out of the goodness of her heart. That’s not to say she’s not a good person; generosity just may not be her first instinct.

The elevator dings again, followed by the hollow sound of steel settling that echoes in the shaft. The doors open with the screeching sound of metallic protest, the brightly lit Dome Complex buzzing with various Sectors of soldiers drilling and training. Our Sector Leader’s eyes widen as he sees us, his usually unreadable features undeniably shocked.