Chart me
like the movements of the stars
Curse me
when I set your sky on fire
To reach the pinnacle of sport, we must direct all of mankind's drives upward. It is not enough to be ambitious, to be competitive, to want to win, to consciously pursue victory. It must be more than this. We must be composed of hunger. We must need to win. We must channel our evolution toward this one, singular goal.
Already we have found that Dominion chemistry increases the athlete's capacity for success. It elevates these conscious drives further via biological incentives, stimulating the body's response in order to reach the brain's targeted outcome. But that alone is not enough.
The Dominion's greatest imperative is the Lamb.
So it is for the evolution of the sport that we introduce a catalyst to our grand experiment. We will not settle for redirecting the impetus of Dominion chemistry-we will place the object of its hunger in its path, and see to what fresh heights sport can be carried. This is the purpose of Nike Drive.
You are Object Zero. You have been selected due to your Lamb chemistry, your athleticism and technique, and your particular mental characteristics. Your purpose in this grand experiment is to play volleyball adequately, such that you are not a detriment to your teammates on the court, and to be a suitable Lamb for multiple Dominions. Your presence is more important than your abilities. Support your Dominions in all things. Nurture their drive, stabilize their egos, and slake their secondary needs before they become a distraction.
Do not play favorites. Do not shun any Dominion's attentions.
During games, if you have not been summarily claimed by the relevant Dominion(s) as assigned by coaching staff, you will be provided with sedatives as necessary to keep you from being exploited by opposing Dominion athletes...
"Great," Kalypso said, balling up the pamphlet without reading any further. "Wonderful. A choice between my favorite things, how will I ever make up my mind?"
Still. She'd had a good idea of how things would go in here, and while no, she hadn't ever really had a choice in the matter, if she had she'd still have walked into Nike Drive with no hesitation at all. It wasn't the Garden, this place. It didn't pretend to be safe, to be kind, to be hers.
Nothing was safe, and nothing was kind, and nothing was hers.
Which meant, in the end, she could burn the world down and smile through it. She could gather fistfuls of the ash of everything and throw them skyward and laugh. She was the world's plaything, its sex doll, its whipping girl, its scapegoat and its perfect little victim, and nothing was hers, and so why should she care about a single cog in its horrible machine?
The Lamb Room of the Nike Drive was an isolation ward. She knew that because of the blood test locks on its two doors-the large one beyond the living quarters, and the narrower one, the one that looked like nothing so much as an elevator. That one she was curious about, and so that was the one she'd been testing every eight hours or so. It never changed, which suggested to Kalypso it wasn't going to allow her entry right now regardless of her chemistry readings.
The other door, she had her guesses about, and yes, she was just being stubborn there.
They had told her that was where the main cafeteria was, and the baths, and-she'd pressed for this when they hadn't volunteered it-the training rooms too. It was going to be that training room that eventually wore her down, doubtless. She was here for that room, after all. Well, not really, because any cell would be worth signing that contract for, as long as it wasn't the Garden, even with its worst clauses intact. But this cell came with a place where she could be exactly as savage, as punishing, as spiteful and defiant as she was at her core. Be adequate, they said. She'd be fucking adequate, all right.
Don't be exploited by opposing Dominions, they said. Oh, just wait til those bastards tried.
They were sending her worse and worse food now. They'd tried just sending her less, but probably someone had read her file and realized that, in Kalypso's case, hunger was a poor motivator. Maybe they'd try cutting off the water in her cramped little shower next, but maybe not. It was distantly, darkly funny, that they might not. Kalypso knew very well that many people who had no difficulty at all with general cruelty nonetheless struggled with littler offenses against Lambs. No moral compunction against coercion, but hygiene was sacred. They'd feel uncomfortable if they didn't let her shower, and of course, Heaven forbid they do anything that compromises their upstanding ethics.
It was hard to eat, harder than usual, but she was well aware that they'd sedate her and shove a feeding tube down her throat if she pushed them to it. She did not intend to push them to that-she needed to be adequate, after all, or what would be the point for anyone?
She paced. A lot. She did squats, wall-sits, push-ups, wall-jumps, lunges, floor sprints. She read the print-outs that spooled tauntingly out from below the monitor that never turned off and never showed anything but a dim black glow.
There were, apparently, seven subjects in Nike Drive. She didn't count, ha. Kalypso understood that as critical as she was to this whole project, she wasn't really considered anything more than a static necessary condition to its masterminds. Probably she was replaceable, though…yeah, go ahead, find another one like her, another tortured creature shot through with poison instead of chemistry, who had all the correct biological fizzes for the task but who had turned their life into an exercise of spite against their entire nervous system. Find someone else called Lamb, who couldn't walk into a room without pulling someone's trigger just by existing, who frankly did not give a shit about Dominion Flares no matter what the chemistry said, who played volleyball at the necessary level of competence and would not be driven to their knees on a court full of rabid, competition-high beasts.
Replaceable, sure. Sure she was.
Kalypso read what they sent her on the subjects. She couldn't be certain it was true, of course, but it was interesting that what they'd sent her was so…clinical. No names, sure, but no photos either. Just a subject number, a position, a hefty string of statistics from previous national play, and a terse paragraph of technical appraisement.
Subject 01 [Set]
Subject 02 [OH]
Subject 03 [OH]
Subject 04 [MB]
Subject 05 [MB]
Subject 06 [OPP]
Subject 07 [Lib]
Only seven, which Kalypso recognized as the perfect formula for rank unpleasantness. If they were serious about playing her-and they would be, she knew this with the same certainty that she knew her own name; even if they weren't yet, they would be-then one of those Dominion subjects would be ousted from the court to make room. Ousted for an Lamb. Yeah, that was gonna go over great.
She tried to focus on what mattered-someone clearly fancied slides, and would you look at the cute little Ds, well well-but other details kept trickling in to interrupt.
Of them, five had played abroad, and Kalypso couldn't help but wonder if the two who hadn't felt the same swift sting of envy as she did when she imagined that. Going somewhere. Living somewhere else, resetting the horizon, starting with a slate that might be pitted and scuffed with assumptions but hadn't been scrawled over yet. Two had played together in high school for a year. Did that make them friends, or rivals, or enemies? In the Garden, there wasn't one without the other.
The old sick anticipatory dread slicked her bones-but they'd said no one from the Garden was a subject Dominion. Yet, they'd said.
Unwilling to think about that 'yet', Kalypso thought about the critiques someone had so coldly written about these people. They were…bizarre. Why they had sent her those was an open question.
Stalls tempo when momentum lost.
Tilts.
Easily bored, disengages with setter.
Lacks initiative on offensive, overreliance on set plays.
Worthless reception.
Overinvests in interpersonal assessments.
Incorrigible.
On the one hand: 'tilts' - find a hitter who doesn't and you've found a liar, and 'worthless reception' - that's what a libero's for. On the other: 'incorrigible'? Excuse you, what the fuck does that mean?
Kalypso spent a moment trying to imagine what hers might say. 'Short hang time'? 'Impatient', maybe. Or something utterly unfathomable, wasn't off the table: 'Needs more pizazz', or some such bullshit.
She wanted to train. She wanted to play. She wanted to do something, anything, outside of this cute little childproofed cell.
When she finally snapped, she snapped clean. Nine days into the Nike Drive experiment, Kalypso slammed her hand into the testing pad beside the big door and felt the faint sting of the needle enter her palm. The testing light flickered on, an angry orange eye-and then switched to green.
Whoever was out there, whoever they were, whatever they would do to her, to try to do, or pretend to do, or think they could do-today, she was going to play.
"Oy, defense. Set me."
"Eh? Didn't get enough yet?"
"Let the man eat, Jaegerjaquez, c'mon."
"Why're you asking him? Don't like Redford's or something?"
"Superstition."
"Shut the fuck up."
"You don't really got room to shit on him, man. You barely moved all morning."
"When Redford deigns to honor me with a set worth moving for, let me know."
"Can we not bicker like children? I'll come with you. I'm ready for more. Uh-are you actually ready now, Cu Chulainn? Finish eating first."
"Nah, let's do it."
"Hey, Yang."
The room did not exactly go silent or still when one among them set his glass down. Instead it hummed with the thrill of a familiar anticipation. Backs straightened. Hands emptied. The three who had been moving toward the training room door paused, setting their feet, picking their sides.
"You want a ball your way, all you gotta do is ask," said the one who had sparked all this electricity. He was grinning. There was nothing but cheer in that grin-but it was a certain type of cheer, a very specific cheer that made very specific promises.
Someone scoffed. It was a quiet sound, barely a breath, and neither of the two at the heart of the tension looked for its origin. Neither could afford to, after all. Getting defensive would be asinine. One might as well lay down on the floor, belly-up in pathetic apology, at that point.
"Fuck this," snarled the hitter who had been leaving. He turned his back on the room. "Move it, defense." Then. "Hey. Come the fuck on-"
Across the room, the large door with the lock panel opened.
The flood of chemical response hit Kalypso like a photographic flash, blinding her for a moment to the sight of what was beyond the door. Not even one single second in their presence and already they were throttling her with their fucking superiority pheromones. Kalypso set her jaw, blinked, and stepped through the threshold. With a hiss, the blood test gate closed behind her.
"Well, well."
Farthest from her, a long, lithe, blue-haired man was grinning. His eyes were like bloody drill-bits, Kalypso thought. It helped, sometimes, an inane unflattering narration in her head. When her whole body was weak with the instinct to crumple at their feet, aching for their attention, it was necessary to disrupt that chemistry through conscious effort. Like, for example, painting brutal, disjointed pictures over their faces that stripped them of their organic reality.
She didn't look at him any longer after she'd assigned him those gory drill eyes.
"Took you long enough," said someone. It was one of the red-heads, a big one, and Kalypso looked at the shaggy ponytail tied high behind him and imagined it was an animal pelt. Something exotic, something endangered, some life he'd extinguished just because he could, just so he could wear it as a threat.
Fuck, why was this so intense? Why was a Flare going off, and whose was it even-no way that was just one Dominion doing that-and was it always like this in here?
What a terrible moment to walk into. It was making her gorge rise. Kalypso considered, briefly, going limp in the arms of chemical nausea and vomiting right here in front of them. First impressions were everything, after all.
But who would she be without her pride, and anyway they might not be open to answering her important question about where the training room was if she did that. Nevermind what their surveilling experimenters would do.
"You're the fucking all-rounder?" Disbelief and disgust colored that snarl. The speaker was spitting mad, yeah; she could feel his ire from all the way over here. It was making her vision haze.
Blue hair-lighter than the other guy's-and bluer eyes, and teeth bared like a tiger. Kalypso focused on that jaw, felt the teeth grinding in there as vividly as if they were scraping her down to the bone. A grinding deathtrap of a person, a jawbone with all its teeth on display-with the help of that image, Kalypso leveraged herself out of the ambush that fury represented, her chemistry screaming in protest the whole time, but then a word crashed down on her so hard it made her ears ring. A silent word, a memory.
Tilts.
Oh, she thought, staring at him across the room. Oh, yeah. I just bet he tilts.
And then what he'd said sunk in.
Either they didn't know, they weren't told what their Object Zero was, what this whole fucking Nike Drive was, or he-
Kalypso stared too long; that was her mistake. She was so caught up in being momentarily lit on fire by 'all-rounder' instead of fucking 'Lamb' that she left herself open for approach…and all that came with it.
The squeal of a chair being pushed back returned her to the urgency of the moment. The crackling thunder of Dominion Flares on the cusp of breaking into a real fight had been redirected…toward the hapless Lamb who'd just burst in on the scene, whom they'd been waiting for and harbored expectations for and holy shit, that was not who she wanted to be, not now, not ever, but especially not now.
Too late, though.
"We've been waiting for you," said the man now standing in front of her. "Were we nothing but numbers on a stat sheet for you, too?"
He was tall-they all were tall, of course they were, even the libero was going to tower over her-with a head of shaggy brown hair and a grin that had the kind of indulgent generosity she loathed. It bespoke condescension and arrogance. It told her that humility had atrophied in this guy a long time ago. It was a quintessential Dominion look, and Kalypso hated it.
He wore an eyepatch. A big one, thick-banded. Kalypso struggled to lock him into a safe reductive judgement because of the implication of that eyepatch. This was not a sport where depth perception could afford to be compromised. She would have thought it impossible-
I guess we're both impossible, thought Kalypso, with a strange sudden nova in her chest. For a heartbeat, she reflected on the idiocy of engaging in this right now, how hard it would be to untangle this feeling of shared experience from the deep-rooted goad of Lamb chemistry-but then she thought, but I want to. So she did. She made her guess rooted half in calculation and half in stupid hopeful whimsy. "The numbers introduced you as Subject 01."
His eyes had the glitter of amber. There, thought Kalypso, seizing on that detail a bit wildly, to stabilize-the moment she'd spoken she'd regretted it, or half-regretted it, or at the very least braced for consequences-and she cased him in amber in her mind, made him sticky with it, so if he so much as brushed against her she'd be stuck fast and smothered in there with him. His laugh was full-bodied and rich, like mead. "Caught me at a glance, did you? Gilbert Redford. Yeah, setter. Whatcha called, little lady?"
Not little lady, that's for fucking sure. "Kalypso Ixora." Her eyes slid toward the three still standing by the far door, fastening for a second on the guy still clearly grinding his teeth. "All-rounder." She wouldn't have used that expression, quite, but whatever. She was a player. She played. It worked.
A hand settled lightly on her shoulder. Kalypso went rigid.
Gilbert Redford was stepping up beside her, gesturing around the room to make introductions. She struggled to hear him through the ringing in her ears. More than anything, she wanted to tear his hand off her and get a solid ten feet between them, to hiss as she did it, maybe to spit, too. She wanted that even more than her body wanted to lean into the contact, to coax his arm into wrapping around her and tucking her close to his side. One stray thought about mutual struggle, one unpruned frond of empathy unfurling, one mistaken moment spent thinking 'maybe we share something, maybe he'll understand', and already here she was, pinned beneath a Dominion's palm, crashing back to reality.
He was warm and he smelled wonderful and his eye was bright and his smile said he would enjoy being kind to her.
Kalypso wanted to gouge her own eyes out, to fill her mouth with ashes and her nose with the acrid sting of burning.
She knew what he wanted, and she bit her tongue so she wouldn't scream.