Paragon ✓

XV. Education

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

   The torch; be yours to hold it high.

   If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

         In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae

She followed him across the base. Frankie and Colton came with them, apparently not wishing to miss the show. He munched silently as they walked, every so often glancing over at her. Finally, she spoke. "I feel... weird."

"Energetic?" he guessed.

"Unbearably," she admitted. "Like there's too much to contain in my body."

"Best thing for that is to run naked through the base," Frankie suggested.

"Just wait till three hours from now," Colton laughed. "That's when it gets really fun."

"What happens in three hours?" she asked. She was clicking her fingers together as she walked to keep from shaking.

"You're going to crash," Holden told her. "And you're going to feel awful."

"Oh." She wasn't particularly angry with the twins, though she thought she should have been. "Where are we going?" she asked instead.

"To have a look at Kabul," he said. "I thought you might like it."

"Why do I feel so weird?"

"We metabolize drugs differently," Holden explained. "Some work better for us, others worse. It's variable between the Paragons, but you and I are the worst."

"Why?"

"Well, we were born during the Gulf war. The researchers who worked on us were seeing the number of soldiers who would come home addicted to painkillers, booze, or worse. They didn't want us to be susceptible to addiction. Am I correct in assuming that you feel strange when you drink alcohol?"

She didn't want to talk about what happened when she drank alcohol. It had been the worst night of her life. "My ears burn."

"We get drunk off of one beer, and then we get really sick." Holden sounded like he'd had experience. "It's the same for other things. Heavy painkillers, any opiate, stimulants, basically any potentially addictive drug, we can't tolerate."

"Opium," Katia said, understanding finally. "That's a big issue here, right?"

"Opium is probably the biggest problem in Afghanistan right now, for civilians, soldiers and insurgents," Holden declared, shoving his hands in his pockets. "It doesn't help that opium is the major economic source."

She looked up at him oddly. "Drugs are Afghanistan's major source of income?"

"It's complicated," he said. "Poppies- opium flowers- have been important in this country for thousands of years. Poppies are hardy crops; they grow regardless of war, famine, drought or poor farming practices. They're a higher-profit and more reliable source of income than wheat or even livestock. What that means, though, is that because everything else has been wiped out by war, people farm poppies instead of food, which makes food even scarcer, and opium even more abundant. Combining that with the fact that living daily with the terror of war would make anyone want to escape reality for an hour, and you have... what's that phrase – "

"A perfect storm?"

"A recipe for disaster, I was thinking," he corrected. "The irony is that in two-thousand, before the war, the Taliban decided to eradicate the poppy. They did a pretty good job. Now they're back to selling it. The poppy is their main source of profits."