VI.

They found the leaderboard at breakfast, names already arranged in order. Connie dreaded the fact that they had been ranked according to a system they did not know, but the dread of the board itself took some time to develop. At first she squinted at the names with the rest, and at the symbols next to them.

"What's that mean?" South asked.

"Mine's a gun," Wash said. "Sharpshooter?"

"I don't know what this thing is."

"It's numbered," North noted. "Do we get points?"

And York, always belittling things, always naturally finding some way for them not to hurt him because he never really took them in at all: "It's like a video game."

(Later, she would think of York differently. He was not shallow. He was simply different from her, processed things differently. And he-

But she - )

The board looked like this:

Carolina
York
Maine
North Dakota
Washington
South Dakota
Wyoming
Florida

No Connecticut. No Connie. She looked at it a second time, squinting, as if that would change the names, and then she settled again, hackles lowered if she had had them. Maybe these names were just placeholders. Maybe the games hadn't started yet. She would do better. Besides, it didn't even matter. They were in a war. What was the point of an internal conflict? (Competition bred success. She knew this. But to see it writ so large scared her.)

They went back to their tables and speared the food with plastic forks and talked about it, North and York and Wash nodding at each other's statements like bobble heads, like disagreement was impossible.

"I'm sure it's to promote learning new skill sets, or something," said North, waving his fork, and Wash looked at him.

"What do the symbols mean?" He wouldn't drop that question.

"Our specialities. They must have picked them between now and our first day, man." That was York.

"The numbers could be generated from kills or shots fired," said Wash.

"In combat or in training?" North asked.

"Both."

Connie saw the few moments in while Carolina was pleased with herself. Later she would wonder why there weren't more of them. York would try to explain to her that Carolina was hard on herself, that nothing would ever be enough, but Connie could not understand what it was to be on the top of the board (to be on the board at all) so she could not see from a perspective where having that spot was meaningless, or did not mean enough. At the breakfast table she saw Carolina smile softly, fiercely because she had ferocity in her but also kindly as if she were seeing a long-absent family member whom she loved. Then Carolina moved closer to York, almost possessive, and then she went back to normal, frowning, uglying her face a little.

At the breakfast table, for a little while, Connie forgot about the board. The names were just names and all things were possible. She had a long life in front of her.

When they next saw the director it was for another training bout, one suite against another. They had not seen one another for a while, like their schedules were kept purposefully different. Connie noticed that a few people were missing: tall, white-armored Utah, just gone. Scheduled out, rotated out, or dead.

Connie wondered if the director would tell them.

"What happened to Utah?" she asked Georgia, all of them standing together in front of the director in the viewing room, and the green-armored man said,

"Equipment malfunction."

"What kind of equipment?"

"His special enhancement. We've each gotten one. I bet you're getting them next."

"And Utah's...what? Sent him to medical? Sent him home."

"He died, Connie. They won't tell us how." Georgia looked up. Rolled a green coin, an old copper penny that looked tiny in his thickly gloved hands, between his fingers. He slipped it into a side pocket, the little depression that usually held the tiny hook to secure a grenade.

Died, she thought, and it tolled around inside her like a bell. The sound Dopplered away.

She said, "That's, that's terrible."

"Yeah, man." He patted the pocket with the coin. "Yeah it is."

They didn't say anything else about it.

The director lined the Freelancers from Connie's suite up in the viewing room, with Georgia's group standing in a loose cluster to the side like the kids still waiting to be picked for a team. The counselor handed them things: big boxy things as unlike a Spartan's augmentations as they could possibly be. These were external and awkward.

"It hooks onto the back of your suit," Carolina said. Of course she had figured it out. Down the line the Freelancers attached the augmentations, first turning them over in their hands, looking at the glowing auxiliary colors of the black boxes or spheres. Connie's had a symbol on it, two people running. She supposed they all had symbols.

She wondered whether it was the same symbol as was next to their name on the board and realized that until she asked someone, Wash probably, about it she wouldn't be able to tell. "Is yours..." She leaned over to ask Florida, the closest one and perhaps the shortest man there, the one she had to crane least to talk to.

Then she straightened up as the counselor spoke again. "Techs will be present to help you make your special ability work," the counselor said.

Connie turned hers over in her hands again, reluctant to put it on until she knew what it did.

The director said, "Agent Connecticut," and she actually jumped.

She tucked the ability pack under her arm and stood straight, meeting his eyes. "Sir."

"You will be first. Report to the training room floor."

First, Connie thought. Why? Are we going in reverse order?

She did not ask him. Later, she would have. Now, she had more to lose. She wanted his approval: he was, after all, in charge, and he had done nothing but be kind to them. She felt that responding well to his tasks was her responsibility, and that, in part, was why she was so disappointed that she was not on the board. She had failed him before she had begun.

But maybe she could make it right if she performed well with her special ability, whatever it was.

The desire to please the director and the desire to investigate him like a criminal warred with each other in her. This lead to the latter actually occurring, later, and she wondered how important the former had ever been.

As it was, she stepped forward.

She reached back, found the magnet and the hook low between her shoulder blades, and slotted the augmentation in. The symbol of the two people running appeared in the lower right corner of her vision, almost touching her FIF radar. Nothing hurt, nothing changed, and she realized she had been tense.

What had happened to Utah?

The councilor moved forward and circled her, and she stood still while he very obviously looked at the attachment on her back.

"You got the hologram," he said, sounding slightly surprised as if he hadn't been able to tell what augmentation each person got until it was strapped to their back. Maybe that was true. She didn't know what rules governed these things.

He said, "You will be able to make one hologram of yourself. It is useful for...keeping enemies off you. They will be...unaware of your position." He had that odd, halting vocal quirk, not suggestive but dreamy and dreary.

"You will be competing against..." He looked down as if consulting an invisible datapad. He had none. "Agent Maine."

Connie cast back to the last time she saw the board and thought that Maine had been near the middle, maybe closer to the top. He was big and quiet and kind and Wash's roommate, and he hadn't volunteered much else. He joined the others in the common room but he didn't speak much. His presence was not awkward but nor did it change anything.

And he was strong.

She was a little bit scared of him.

Maine stepped out of line. His armor creaked, the overhead lights reflecting off the round, gold armor with its flat bug eyes. The counselor walked around him too. Connie saw Carolina and Wash behind him as she watched him circle.

"Agent Maine," said the counselor. "Your augmentation is invisibility. This effect is temporary."

So he would be invisible and she would be doubled.

She would be fighting herself, at times.

She would be the only one who couldn't hide, the most obvious, the one who stood out even though he was the one who was over six feet high and massive.

She didn't like the sound of that, or the feeling.

Always with being watched.

"Normally," said the counselor, "you will not be running your augmentations without an AI's supervision. You must call back to the ship to use it. Alpha must be...aware if you are using it. Otherwise, the power will all be routed to your suit. It will fail. It will hurt you."

The counselor didn't usually speak for this long. The effect was hypnotic. If she had been in a classroom instead of an army she would have started staring out the window, wishing she were in the lawn.

York disrupted the miasma. "Permission to speak?"

The counselor said, "Go ahead, Agent York." The director nodded at the same time, just giving his permission.

"I thought AI could only liaise with capitol ships, things like that. Big things. Bigger than Maine." He laughed a little. He was talking in circles, trying to be funny. He thought he was doing well. Everyone else was silent.

The director spoke, and every eye turned to him. He still stood with his hands behind his back, shuttered light falling in green stripes across his black clothes. "That is usually the case. However, we have put measures in place to allow for unusual usage." There were no pauses in his speech. The director was sure of himself.

Connie picked at the words but knew that she didn't know enough about AI to contest them. He was probably right. Besides, she couldn't change what she could not see. She could only work with what was present - the board, the other people in her group, herself. Anything else...it was like trying to change the government.

It was impossible.

It wasn't impossible to go around it though, to reach to the people who pulled the original things, to find the things the government didn't want you to find.

It was impossible to change what was right in front of you. Connie and Wash had this belief in common.

Unlike Wash, Connie liked to sidestep it.

The direst said, "You will be issued with paint guns." He sounded demanding. "The first person to hit the other three times will be the winner. You will see the techs for the rest. Go now."

Connie and Maine exchanged glances, then walked together to the side of the room and down the angular hallways into the arena. The Freelancers almost always used these passages, not the larger one on the deck below, so that the people above could see what was going on. She liked transparency, but had a feeling that pitting Freelancers against one another would cause more drama than anything else.

A tech was waiting at the bottom of the ramp, just like she had expected. The young woman handed both of them assault rifles, the snub-nosed version instead of the more flexible DMR, and moved around to both Connie's and Maine's augmentations, checking, wiggling them in.

"Do you have any questions?" she asked. She could have only sounded more bored if she were chewing gum. She looked Maine up and down, but met Connie's gaze evenly.

"How'd you start working here?" Connie asked.

The woman said, "My sister. Get out there," and patted her on the shoulder.

Connie said, "No secondary weapons?" and leaned the long body of her gun against her armored forearm so she could hold up her other hand, empty where a pistol would fit.

The tech said, "Not for this exercise."

So it was just part of the variables. Connie kept walking.

Maine put a hand on her shoulder as they walked down the last, short portion of the aisle, just a second-long, brotherly gesture like between two men. "Good luck."

She nodded. "You too."

Then he walked to the other side of the arena.

She stood where she was, rewrapping her fingers around the trigger and shifting her weight from foot to foot. What would she get if she won this? Maybe her name would move up a space. Maybe it would move into view. That would be nice.

(It was a goal to look forward to, like a cool shower after a long jog on a hot day.)

She waited for just a few seconds until the buzzer went off, a proper one this time, loud and ear-assaulting instead of FILSS's friendly tones. The arena was dotted with columns again and she moved to stand behind one, wondering whether if she could jump on top of one if she tried. They weren't higher than anything she had jumped onto on the obstacle course where she had learned to use her armor.

She couldn't hear Maine, couldn't see anything on her HUD except her lone green dot. Maybe he had gone invisible already. What would the augmentation feel like? She thought she could feel the eyes of the others - Wash, York, Carolina - on her back.

She triggered her special ability.

Something flashed out in front of her, brown and cream and tall, and she saw the air distort as the hologram raced away from her. Then it slowed to human speed and walked out in front of her, away from the columns. It held its gun at rest like she did, but moved with less strategy, less intelligence. She couldn't say that she thought it moved like her: it moved like the average person.

She took a few steps back against the column and wondered whether the hologram could shoot fake bullets. That would be really distracting and very helpful. Maybe if she went around the side to the right, Maine would attack the hologram from the left and she could pop out where he wouldn't expect.

These thoughts took seconds. They were more images than words, as she pictured the scenario playing out. She moved one foot.

The hologram flickered. She still couldn't see Maine on the HUD but she thought that he must be doing something, because the brown-armored simulacrum was flickering like it had done when it first appeared.

She shot toward it. Her pink paint bullets hit something in midair and splattered, painting flat planes of armor with white flecks at the edge. So Maine was there. A few more shots went wide. She thought that she already had one point on him: he still had to get three.

But he gave no more sign of where he was located. She moved around the column, daring a few feet of no visibility to get a new angle while the hologram still stood, dumb and alert, as her bait. A few tense seconds passed.

Maine tackled the hologram. There was no more subtle word for his action: he didn't shoot, he didn't fight, he just jumped like an animal, his gun holstered at his waist. She couldn't tell what direction he had come from. The hologram disappeared beneath him.

She shot him again. He shot back, pink flakes flying off his bulky white armor and she ducked behind the column again while paint splattered past her face.
If she put the hologram out he would just go invisible and stalk either her or it.

It was like playing Tic-Tac-Toe. Adults couldn't do it because the strategy was too obvious. They got bored.

But Connie and Maine still had guns. They would need to just face each other eventually, without either kind of hiding.

And she was winning two to nothing.

Two shots came from behind her, in quick succession. One hit the wall and burst. The other hit her in the face, blinding half of her visor with pink. She pushed backward, blearily, feeling the thick struts on the back of her armor hit the wall far sooner than she expected her skin to. Disoriented, she shot once at random and then turned and dashed around the other side of the column, now having gone in a 360 around it, to stand where her hologram had been.

Maine barreled out from between two columns, fired, and hit her again. Two to two. The others were watching. Connie glanced down and saw the symbol of her hologram switch from red to blue. Hopefully she could use it again, although it would help if she had a plan -

Instead she just fired back. She made Maine put his head down and hide behind a column, ducking out of sight.

Maybe he really was out of sight. She thought she could still hear his armor creaking, maybe footsteps -

She thought, might as well fire in the direction you least want your enemy to be if he could be anywhere, and jumped backwards.

She fired a few feet away from her, filling the air with pink splotches. Some of them resolved around the hulking form of Maine, barely a few feet away. He snapped back to invisibility, shot for the third time now. She had won: he should be stopping but he was not instead letting his momentum carry him forward and he slammed into her.

His weight carried both of them to the floor. Once he was down he slammed his forearms against the floor on either side of her, a ringing sound that seemed to bash against her ears, breathed once, and looked at her. Should have triggered the hologram then, she thought. I could have just stepped to the side, stepped out of it like it was a second skin and I was shedding.

She looked up at him. He stepped off her gingerly. "Sorry."

"Sorry?" She sat up, both knees on the floor first because she felt pretty ginger about it all too. "I was the one who shot you."

"I sat on you," he grunted, and she smiled begrudgingly.

"Match complete," said FILSS. "Victor: Agent Connecticut."

She beamed. She had won something. Maybe she would end up on the board now.

She and Maine walked off the field together. The tech came out to greet them but retreated back into the hallway when she saw them, as if she had only been going to go out if they had refused to go in. Connie locked eyes with her for a moment to see if she would ask any questions about the augmentations, but she did not.

"It didn't hurt," Connie said to Maine. "He said the special abilities might feel strange without an AI."

Maine grunted what sounded like an assent. Connie liked that he wasn't a sore loser, although she would also have liked to know more about what he felt. Did he care about his place on the board? What did he care about?

When she rejoined the group she headed for Wash but found South first. "Did it hurt?" South asked, and Connie shook her head.

"It didn't feel like anything. Which one did you get?"

"I can make a domed energy shield," she said. "The same as North."

"Good luck."

"Thanks. I might just need it."

Connie stood beside Wash, almost wiggling with excitement. "I won," she said, and repeated it because she had been holding too much of the excitement in. "I won."

"I saw," he said. "You did good."

The director called the next two names, and when York and South went down to the arena Connie craned forward with the rest of the Freelancers to watch.

The director stood straight and stuff, with his pale hands behind his back and his eyes shadowed behind the green tint of his dark glasses.