Page 17

17

Don’t Walk, Run

W e entered the training center at 10:10 a.m., our footfalls sounding uncommonly loud in the mostly empty, cavernous building. The very instant we spotted our instructors on the opposite side of the center, Brady mumbled, “Oh fuck,” under his breath, and as one we picked up the pace.

Even with the entire length of the twenty-five-yard pool separating us, I already knew it’d be the last time we’d ever be casual about being late to meet any of them. Even the measly ten minutes was too long when their stares alone seemed capable of committing murder. How, I had no idea. But I still wouldn’t put it past them. A tangible sense of danger wafted off them like heatwaves.

The unease that I’d been carrying only expanded, stretching at the boundaries of my skin, causing it to feel irritatingly taut.

The two men and one woman stood in a line, their legs shoulder-width apart, their arms loose at their sides. Their poses were deceptively relaxed. I could practically feel their muscles coiled and ready to pounce.

“Don’t walk. Run!” the man in the middle hollered at us, and we didn’t hesitate to obey, Bobo keeping pace with us.

When we shored up to stand across from them, the man in the center, who was also the tallest, pursed his lips. “You’re late.”

“We ran into some complications before coming here,” Layla offered, and I was glad that, for once, she stayed her tongue and didn’t tack on, “We were busy watching a new student being tranq’d and electrocuted into submission.”

“Excuses won’t cut it with us. You’ve agreed to be here. You’ve made a commitment, and we expect you to honor it and not waste our time.”

“Um …” Brady said as I shifted uncomfortably on my feet. Already I wanted the three teachers to approve of me, and I didn’t like feeling that way one bit. “To be fair, we didn’t actually agree or commit to anything, not with any real free will anyhow. We’re being coerced into being here by threat of extreme violence, in case you didn’t already realize that.” Brady laid that all out free of his normal sarcasm.

I expected at least one of them to flinch at that reminder, but none did. Either they were remarkably skilled at controlling their reactions, which they likely were, or they just didn’t care enough to endanger whatever incentive Magnum was offering them for being here.

“Free will is relative,” the man said.

Is it really though? Shouldn’t free will be, you know, free to have and wield? I thought it, but didn’t say it out loud.

“The rules are very different once you enter this world.”

“And what world is that, exactly?” Hunt asked.

“The world of physical powers. In the societies most people live in, material wealth, social class, and political standing are often the determining factors of power levels, especially when one takes into account the rampant corruption that infects nearly all modern civilizations across the globe.”

At this, the man to his right nodded with a stout frown, but didn’t otherwise comment.

“But when a person develops their physical prowess so it cannot be ignored, they can overcome the restraints of the limited wealth and social standing they might have been born into. The rules change. And when one also considers powers beyond those commonly found in this world that affect the physical laws here …” He shook his head in what seemed akin to awe. “Then it’s within the realm of possibility to entirely transform the governing rules.”

Griffin crossed his arms and studied our instructors, eventually addressing the man in the middle: “From what we’ve seen so far, we can return from death. That sounds like exactly the kind of power you were just referring to as an advantage. Yet look at us. We’re prisoners here, trapped precisely because of these extraordinary powers.”

The man shared a look with the other two teachers before saying, “We’ll do whatever we can to teach you how to harness and wield every advantage you have.”

“That’s right. We agreed to be here because we want to help you learn everything you can do,” the woman chimed in with a pretty accent that suggested Spanish was her first language. With her lustrous dark hair, round facial structure, dark eyes, brown skin, and small frame, I guessed her ancestral heritage was connected to the indigenous tribes of Central or perhaps South America. But it wasn’t an appropriate time to ask.

Bobo circled my friends to once again sit atop my feet where he could keep an eye on our instructors.

“Dogs aren’t allowed in the training arena,” said the man in the center while studying Bobo. “It will have to wait for you outside.”

“‘It’ is a boy named Bobo,” I said, “and it’s important that he remain with me at all times.” The man started to shake his head, but I persisted, meeting his dark stare and holding. “These four people”—I angled my stare up and down the line of my friends—“and my dog are the only things that really matter to me in the entire world. They’re the only ones I trust, and the only ones I love. My friends and I are supposedly immortal. But Bobo isn’t. I have to keep him in sight at all times so he isn’t used as leverage to get me to fall into line.”

Even though I kept the threat to Bobo vague, it was the first time I’d even admitted it to myself. Once I heard myself say it, I realized how true it was. Bobo was the first one Magnum would threaten to hurt if he wanted me to do something. My sweet boy wouldn’t survive death like we would.

Griffin and Hunt, who stood on either side of me, moved up half a step so that they also flanked Bobo.

Our instructors were still examining Bobo when the man to our left announced, “Bobo can stay.”

The man in the middle frowned at him before sighing and looking at us again. “If he’s to stay, then he must be well behaved.”

“He is. Very well behaved,” I answered immediately.

“You think so, but will he continue to be ‘well behaved’ when you appear to be in grave danger? When your body and life are being threatened? When he sees you lying dead on the mat?”

“Laying it all right out there, aren’t we?” Layla mumbled under her breath. “So much for pretending we’ll actually be safe in our classes.”

The man at the center scoffed. “Your abject lack of safety shouldn’t be news to you. You’re here to be experimented upon, to have the limits of your immortality tested and studied.”

Layla huffed. “Still doesn’t make it any less hard to hear.”

“If you’re looking to be handled with kid gloves, then you’ve come to the wrong people. We’re not here to coddle you. We’re not even here to take it easy on you. We will push you to your limits and beyond. That’s our job.”

Brady bristled. “So you’re just here to try to murder us? Like everyone else?”

The woman stared at Brady. “No, we’re here to teach you how to get stronger. And to see what you’re capable of.”

“While killing us,” Layla deadpanned.

The fact that we were being forced to become more comfortable with this shocking topic of conversation just made my skin crawl all the more. I’d never wanted to run so hard, so fast, and so freaking far away from this damned place.

“We’ll be testing your limits,” repeated the man in the center. “Whether you die or not is up to you and your ability to defend yourself. I’ll warn you now, my colleagues and I are quite skilled at ending lives.”

“Great, totally fucking great,” Layla muttered before tipping her head to one side in consideration of the man. “How?” she eventually asked him. “How do you sound so, I dunno, intelligent and refined while still looking like you do?”

It was a bit of a weird question, maybe even a stupid one, actually, but I didn’t understand why every one of the man’s muscles stiffened and bulged—and there were a great many of them now on threatening display. He wore a sleeveless workout tank top and shorts that revealed most of his chiseled thighs.

Through gritted teeth, he asked, “Because I’m Black?”

Layla tsk ed. “No, not because you’re Black. Do I look like a prejudiced asshole prick to you? Your dark skin’s fucking gorgeous. I mean how do you sound like a freaking textbook while also looking like you do?” She ran a hand up and down the air in front of his body. “You’re jacked.”

When he still didn’t relax, Layla elucidated some more: “How do you find time to develop your mind along with your body to such an extreme? From how ripped you are, it looks like you’d need to spend hours every day just keeping up your training.”

Finally, he visibly relaxed. “Ah. That’s one of the first things we’ll teach you. Of all the muscles you have, your mind is the most important of all. Though the saying, ‘mind over matter’ is a bit banal, it’s also true.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Hunt said, and I glanced at him, hoping he wasn’t about to follow up on Layla’s odd line of questioning. “From everything we’ve seen, Magnum only wants to test our ability to die and resurrect. Why would he want to train us so we become stronger in any way other than our immortality?”

None of our teachers had a ready answer. When the other two only glanced toward the man between them, he answered, “I’ve known Magnum the longest. While I won’t be sharing many of my impressions with you, I will tell you the man is remarkably perceptive and long-sighted. I think he’s training you for what’s to come farther down the path we’re embarking upon together. Also, he told us you were interested in training to become ninjas.”

I waited for at least one of them to laugh or snicker. They didn’t.

“Perhaps it’s simply an incentive or a reward for you at this time.”

An incentive and reward system, like we were actual lab rats. Since Magnum seemed to view us as nothing more than that, I supposed it made a certain morbid kind of sense that’s what our training would be about.

The man straightened his shoulders an extra fraction of an inch and clasped his wrists behind his back. “We’ve wasted enough time talking, and you were already late to begin with. The dog can stay for now. But if he becomes a threat or a problem in any way, he’ll have to go, no matter what argument you make.”

I scratched behind Bobo’s ears and beamed up at the man, who was maybe an inch or two taller than any of my guys, who were all around six feet tall. “Yeah, of course, I understand. He’s very well trained though.”

The man frowned in obvious disbelief, but I was taking the win for now.

“This is Yolanda,” he said with a nod to the woman. “This is Armando.” He tilted his chin to the man on his right. “And I’m Homer. You’ll find appropriate clothing and gear waiting for you in the locker rooms. In future, we’ll expect you to be changed and ready to go at the start of class time. For today only, you have five minutes.”

“We’ll be working out today already?” Layla asked. “I thought today was orientation only.”

“You assumed wrong. Every day not spent learning, growing, and bettering ourselves is a day wasted. Your five minutes are counting down.”

With a “follow” directed at Bobo, my friends and I tore off in the direction Yolanda pointed out to us and piled into a co-ed locker room. As I grabbed the pile of clothes under a label with my name on it and scooted into one of the many changing rooms, I had mere moments to decide what to do about the note still tucked into the folds of my sleeve. I could leave it with my clothes in the locker room and hope no one snuck in here to snoop, or I could take it with me, hoping there were no cameras here to spot me transferring it from one hiding place to another. Beyond the noise we were making, the training center was completely quiet. But in the same way I didn’t trust enough to let Bobo out of my sight, I didn’t trust leaving behind the potential help of our faux parents either. We were one hundred percent being spied on. Did that include rifling through our possessions when we weren’t looking? Short of someone sniffing our undies, I didn’t think anything was off limits around here.

Without a better idea, I pretended to wipe down my chest with my discarded shirt in case there were hidden cameras. I had no good reason to rub my shirt over my chest, but people did peculiar things all the time. The action could be dismissed as such an oddity. While I was “wiping,” I pushed the sleeve into my sports bra and managed to wedge the note under my cleavage, where it tucked securely beneath my boobs with the tight elastic band underneath keeping it in place. For now, it was the best I could do. My exercise clothing had no pockets, and I didn’t think the note would fare any better stuffed into one of my socks.

After possibly the fastest pee break of my life, the five of us and Bobo ran back out into the gym, only to find Homer studying a digital clock on the wall, one with a readout similar to that of a stopwatch.

“You’re fifteen seconds late,” he announced. “That’ll cost you fifteen laps around the gym, one per second.”

When we just gaped at him, he added, “Make that twenty and counting.”

I told Bobo to “follow,” and we broke into a steady jog. A narrow, open path skirted the entire length of the spacious building’s walls—and now I understood why.

Okay, so Homer was obviously a hardass. But maybe we’d learn a lot from him and the others. At least that part was genuinely exciting.

The killing part, not so much. In fact, not at all.

I pushed away the thought and the immediate panic it delivered. Still, my breath squeezed in my chest, and my heart gave an irregular thump that made me wince.

All the comforts we’d enjoy would come at the expense of our lives, our freedoms. Shackles might as well have clanked with every step we took.

How long till one of us was forced to die again? Till the rest of us were forced to watch?

Bile crept up my throat; I had to swallow it forcefully down.

Welcome to the Institute for the Advancement of Immortals, where dying is part of your coursework.

Welcome to hell on earth.