The Lost Ones

Tinga lay on her side with Kavi spooned against her stomach, hands idly stroking him in an unconscious familial gesture. Brin was leaning against her back, leaning over to stroke our four-year-old brother as well. Vada was snuggled against Ashton and Taz, her back against Ashton's chest, her neck arched as Ashton stroked her from chin to clavicle, and her legs curled comfortably in Taz's lap. It was a very sensual pose, but there was no hint of the active sexuality that we had occasionally glimpsed some of the staff use with each other.

Jace sat rigidly next to Zack and Eva at the head of the bed, every inch the soldier that she was, her small frame beginning to lengthen out. If she wasn't careful, she'd be as tall as Zack and Eva, whose willow frame had softly budding breasts and just the slightest widening of the thighs. Krit and Syl were attached to each other, leaning against Ashton, Vada, and Taz, their feet touching Tinga and Brin.

The Quad Squad: Ben, Jack, Seth, and Zane were gathered together at the foot of the bunk, laughing and plotting for their latest extended foray into strategy and implementation. Anika, Jondy and I bridged the gap between the four boys and the rest of our pack, huddled together and it was a sight that will be ingrained in my memory as one of the sweetest I'd ever experienced. It was a good thing most of us were still small, otherwise, having the eighteen of us on the same bed would have been awkward.

I felt a moment of sadness as I thought about other brothers and sisters who didn't make it this far, some dying during missions against older X-series, others being taken away with the shakes and not being seen again except as a barcode on a slab of granite in what Ben had termed the Barcode Graveyard.

There had been many more of us originally, a full platoon of thirty-two neat little soldiers. By some miracle we had retained an equal number male and female. Female transgenics were pretty rare now it seemed, or else there was some chauvinistic head lab geek somewhere who didn't like the idea of female super soldiers being able to kick their collective butts.

Several died when we had to play Seek and Destroy with the X4s, our mean predecessors, and others died during the Tank, or the Pit, and one had died on the obstacle course, her little body run to the point of exhaustion when she slipped off the thin plank and falling to impale herself on one of the spikes in the bottom of the pit.

"We should name those who didn't make it so they won't be forgotten and dishonored as just a number. They were important to us, to me," I whispered against the comfortable silence.

"That's a good idea, 4-Max," Zack corrected himself with a smile.

"How many more good ideas is she going to come up with?" Ash teased, and we chuckled. There was another moment of silence as our thoughts went back to the Lost Ones. Losing so many of our own had made an already tight-knit unit into a nearly inseparable force that fell back on each other to an extreme.

We didn't trust anyone or any other unit as much as each other, for wasn't it proven, that the only people we could rely on were those in our unit? Most of the other units had had Watchers in constant contact with them for the first few years of their life, but not us, not Unit 2. We had Watchers, but for the most part they had almost no interaction with us unless absolutely necessary, having us as one large group together, unwittingly helping to further develop the feral and animalistic pack structure that we now held, and the absolute distrust of those not one of us.

We also had trainers and teachers who from the cradle almost were teaching us language, speech, grammar and military concepts. Already I was fluent in almost five languages to the point that I could pass as a native, for I not only could speak it and recognize it, but I could read, write, and understand them. The fact that Colonel Lydecker preferred to keep a policy that kept the units separate unless absolutely necessary had instilled in us a deep anathema to any not our 'pack'.

"Who should we name first?" Taz asked rubbing Vada's back in a soothing gesture. Vada had lost her 'natural' brother to the big X4 mission that took so many of us, and she still hadn't gotten over it. That was another thing. Many of our pack had 'natural' brothers or sisters with us, more so than any other unit. Natural meaning that we shared enough of the same genetic material or characteristics that in the real world we could pass for true siblings like me and Krit, though he was at least a year and a half older than I was.

There were only a few twins, Zane and Anika, being an example, though Anika had been tampered with on purpose to come out a girl instead of the boy and separated into a different surrogate. Because of that little quirk, they were born at almost the exact same moment, though the doctor's are pretty sure Anika was a thousandth of a second faster out of her surrogate than Zane. It was that close.

"Vada's brother," Ben said just as softly.

"Vada, do you want to name him?" Tinga asked gently, reaching over Brin and Kavi to touch her foot. Vada gave a weak smile.

"Ferro, because he never could say 'feral' and he was as wild as Seth," Vada spoke very quietly, and only the fact that we had super hearing could we even make it out.

"Ferro it is."

And so we spent the remaining hours of night time naming the fourteen Lost Ones. Ferro, Kane, Lark, Lara, Nala, Shasta, Cypress, Hind, Nano, Elayne, Kyle, Davida, Briac, and Crystal may have been gone, but they would never be forgotten.

We sat and reminisced about those we missed, laughing and crying and bonding over the shared memories. Ferro's wide-eyed looks of delight as we ran through the forest on a Seek and Destroy mission, his yips of happiness when we caught and subdued the target. Kane wrestling with Zack and Seth, trying to prove which one was the strongest of the pack; Lark singing softly to us at night, putting music to Ben's stories, and somehow bringing them to life in a whole different way.

Lara and her tough-chick attitude that would put Jace's to shame, the two often got into heated arguments but were best friends even when the blood flew; Cypress always seeming to fall out of the trees that were his namesake; Nala as proud as any lioness could ever hope to be and just as quick to defend her pack. Hind as swift as any deer and loving to read about Greek mythology; Shasta the first time she tasted the contraband soda that was her namesake and how it had tickled her nose and gave her the hiccups for the rest of the day to Lydecker's annoyance. Nano and his love for all things tiny, whether they be robots, bugs, travel sized bottles of soap, deodorant, shampoo, or anything else if it was small he loved it.

Elayne the bookworm, who used to spend every off hour in the library reading any book she could get a hold of, especially the classics like Tom Sawyer or anything from Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, and the poets Poe, Blake, Longfellow, Frost, Dickens. Kyle and his obsession with G.I. Joe's and comic books, trying his best to draw sketches of such characters as Duke, Snake-eyes, Storm Shadow, and Scarlet. He even did small portraits of the Pack, and we cherished these small reminders of his talent, hiding them in a secret compartment in the High Place where they would be safe from the elements and discovery.

Davida was the tall African queen who would sometimes go weeks speaking nothing but Swahili or trying to teach the rest of us how to dance. Now there was a memory that would live in infamy. Imagine a bunch of child soldiers in fatigues and grease paint trying to do a Massai rain dance. Crystal with eyes so pale a blue they looked like her translucent namesake, and her ready smile and quick wit. She'd tease Cypress endlessly and could pull off a prank worthy of the Quad Squad and no one would ever suspect it was the sweet little slip of a girl.

Briac was always fascinated with building things, his mind at work trying to improve or create better designs for buildings, bridges, and any other structure he could get his hands on. He could not for the life of him figure out Stonehenge, he would always be muttering about angles and inefficient labor of the times, and how improbable it was that it could be meant for anything other than a very large sundial.

These memories were very dear even if not all of them were happy, and it was true, naming them made them seem that much more real to us than a stupid series of random numbers encoded into our DNA. Coming up with the names to match our beloved Lost Ones was half the fun, trying to think about how they'd react and what name best described that particular sibling.

Thinking about them kept them alive to us, and I realized then that they were never truly gone unless we let them that we carried them with us and had been touched in both positive and negative ways. Because of Crystal and Briac failing in the tank, we all did our best to beat the facility record and hold our breaths as long as possible. When Elayne overworked herself trying to beat the obstacle course we learned to watch ourselves and figure out when we couldn't push ourselves any further and to pace ourselves until we reached safer ground.

Ferro, Kane, Shasta, Davida, and Kyle taught us that life was unfair and to survive we needed to be tougher no matter what. The first time we faced off with the X4s, we had had no idea what to expect. They taught us to be more aggressive and to prepare for an apocalypse and expect the worst. The X4 unit we squared off with picked us off one by one and chose five to make an example of, even after they had achieved the objective.

Those were the hardest deaths of all, because they died needlessly and on the whim of a cruel and unstable X4 commander. They snapped Ferro's neck and spine in three different places before even explaining why they were doing this, then Kane and Davida had tried valiantly to avenge and get away and they were summarily shot; Shasta was picked up and impaled on a nearby branch that two of the X4s had sharpened to a fine point, and Kyle was stretched between four more of the Four's until he was ripped to pieces.

Hearing their cries and knowing that we were helpless to do anything would forever haunt our dreams. It was made worse when Lydecker wouldn't even let us help Shasta, so while she hung there, scared and whimpering, Lydecker shot her. We were forced to watch and the only thing that kept us from attacking Lydecker was that he seemed just as disturbed by her death and suffering and the loss of the others.

Cypress, Hind, Lara, and Nano died in the next exercise against the X4s, but this time, we took as many of them out as we could. Lara killed three before one snapped her neck whom I shot personally, Cypress and Hind managed to take out the C.O. and Twic, effectively destroying the chain of command before they were gunned down by snipers that Zane and Ben killed with their bayonets right after.

Nano rigged one of Zane's explosive creations and set off some booby-traps, taking out almost half of their remaining unit. He had stayed behind to make sure nothing was sabotaged and was caught in the blast. Needless to say, we won the exercise with a minimum of casualties on our part, but we had become more ruthless and less open to other units.

The X4s had proven to us that we couldn't trust any but our own, especially if they were transgenic and able to hurt us as bad as we could them. We treat every exercise against other units as actual battle and we go all out, taking whatever measures necessary to not only win the mission but also keep our unit safe. Our unit now has the reputation that we're the ones to look out for; other units tremble in trepidation at having to face us.

Lark and Nala had gotten the shakes, which is what we called the seriously bad seizures we got at times, and they had been taken away. Ben, Jack, Jondy, and I had snuck out trying to find our packmates and we found them all right. Lark was the first to die, she seized so bad she knocked her head on the edge of the table and never recovered from the resulting coma. Colonel Lydecker ordered her autopsied, and Nala put up more of a struggle, literally.

Fierce Nala who had ripped out the throat of an X4 trying to snipe our positions during the second battle fought just as hard not to let her seizures overcome her, but in the end, the head doctor shook his head at whatever readings were on his clipboard from the next round of tests, and Lydecker ordered her disassembled. They snapped her neck and then cut her up just like Lark.

Lark who would never again sing one of the ballads Ben came up with, Nala who would never again get sent into Solitary after being provoked to defend a packmate. Jondy and I had cried for weeks afterward and Jack and Ben had come up with a really nasty payback for the doctors and nurses who had cut our sisters up.

It was now early in the morning and we all left Zack's bunk reluctantly for our own, in no hurry to leave the warmth and companionship of the others for our cold bunks. But we had to, for to be caught out of our designated bunk would be an infraction, and penalized by Solitary or worse, and we would never let one another take the rap for our own mistakes.

There was really less than hour before reveille, but we all settled down for a brief rest, knowing that tomorrow was going to be another long day. Somehow though, the day didn't seem so bad, because now we had names, we were real, and there was nothing that could change that.