Free Dove Arising by Karen Bao

bread at me. I peel them apart to check for anything suspicious. Between them are four slices of lab-grown chicken egg with crumbling grayish yolks. There’s also an apple, some water, and a few dietary supplement pills.
    “Thanks.” I gratefully bite into the bread. “Have you eaten?”
    “Yeah, we did,” Vinasa says. “ Very quickly. Set new records, I think, but the Militia doesn’t track stuff like that.” A smile darts across her face. “The rest of the matches weren’t as entertaining as yours. Nash scratched me on the cheek.”
    “But the Medics fixed Vin in a minute!” Eri says. “And Wes beat Ganymede Zeta with your knee-in-the-manly-areas idea.”
    Ganymede is one of Jupiter’s meatier cronies, with a shaved head and a skinny snake tongue.
    Eri sighs. “Callisto gave Jupiter crap for beating up a girl—don’t know why she puts up with him.”
    “Callisto?”
    “Jupiter’s girlfriend, the one with the pimples. They fight a ton.”
    I’ve seen the girl hanging off his arm—her face, though finely formed, is cratered with acne scars like the moon of her namesake. Her hair has stripes like mine, brown and yellow rather than black and silver.
    “Oh—Wes came in here about an ankle sprain that turned out to be nothing,” Vinasa says, eliciting a frown from Eri. “He hung around and asked us if you were okay.”
    I stop chewing and gawk at her.
    “Probably wanted to congratulate you on nearly sterilizing Jupiter,” Eri says defensively. “Those two never liked each other. Wes transferred from Base I when we were all fifteen, ’cause our Medical Department had a better job opening. He had to apply for a transfer permit and everything. Well, Jupiter ignored Wes until he saw him run in conditioning class, then tried to pick on him, but Wes almost kicked Jupiter’s teeth out. Since then, Jupiter’s steered clear of him . . . until today.”
    People rarely relocate from one base to another—I suspect that the Committee tries to thwart interaction among the bases so that trouble on one doesn’t slither into the other five. If the other bases didn’t appear in our news reports and history texts, we’d risk forgetting they exist. As the first transfer I’ve ever met, Wes might as well be an alien.
    “You sure Wes transferred for a job?”
    “It’s all he ever told anyone.”
    I’m down to the calcium pills, which I swallow without the aid of water.
    “How you feeling?” Eri gives my hand a squeeze.
    “Better.” My vision blurs again, and my eyelids threaten to fall of their own accord. The food had a sedative in it, maybe melatonin.
    “It’s nice that they give us the nights off,” Vinasa says. “Why don’t you take a nap? It’s still early, but we should get some sleep ourselves.”
    Before I can respond, everything dissolves again.

    I wake to a dark world, energized. If every object weren’t in such sharp focus, and if my bladder weren’t so uncomfortably stretched, I’d believe this was a dream.
    After using the toilet, I tiptoe through the empty hallways and find a domain of wonders—no security pods in sight. Curiosity about the Medical facilities takes over, and because curfew doesn’t go into effect for another twenty minutes, I decide to explore.
    The hall is devoid of Medics and patients alike. Because we haven’t fought real battles in so long, fewer active Militia members are getting hurt. Most Medics are in the civilian Medical Department, contending with a recent bout of influenza that has afflicted a good part of Sanitation. Those moles get sick a lot.
    Before I get to the end of the hall, footfalls approach. They’re too frequent to be the echoes of my own. Sudden dread seizes me—what if it’s someone who will tattle to one of the instructors and guarantee me negative points before the first evaluation? If that happens, I won’t be able to pay Mom’s Medical bill; the prize money of a low-ranking trainee can’t even buy her a maintenance robot to