Chapter 9: Echoes of the past
The hiss of the pod door was the sound of a tomb sealing shut on his brief moment of grace. Kaelan stood in the harness, the phantom pain in his ribs a fading echo, the brilliant, burning focus of the simulation replaced by the familiar, leaden weight of reality. The cool, ozone-scented air of the bay felt thin and insufficient in his lungs, a poor substitute for the oil-stained atmosphere of the refinery. He could still feel the ghost of the knife's grip in his palm, a lingering sensation of rightness that made the return to his own clumsy body all the more jarring.
Jax was already out, vibrating with an energy that seemed to brighten the dim space around him. He practically bounced on the balls of his feet, a live wire of triumph. "We did it! One hour, forty-seven minutes, and twelve seconds! We beat Cain by a full twenty seconds! Do you know what this means?" He didn't wait for an answer, grabbing Kaelan by the shoulders in a gesture that was half-celebration, half-disbelief. "It means we're not just cannon fodder! It means we're on the map! People are going to have to look at us now! They can't just write us off!"
Elara emerged more sedately, her expression a mask of calm that didn't quite reach her eyes. She offered no celebration, only a slow, thoughtful blink as she looked at the final time displayed on her pod's screen, her fingers twitching as if she were already typing up a mental report.
The weary technician ambled over, his datapad emitting a soft, insistent chime. "Run complete. Data stream for Pods 22, 23, 24 compiled and uploaded. Minor anomalies logged on Pod 23's instance. Performance metrics are... statistically significant." He gave Kaelan a long, appraising look, his tired eyes scanning him up and down as if trying to spot the source of the "anomalies" with his naked eye. He shook his head, a gesture of profound professional confusion. "A knife," he muttered under his breath, the words laden with a sense of violated physics, before shuffling away. "A full behavioral review will be conducted by the tactical analysis team this evening. Don't break anything else before then."
The news of their time, it seemed, traveled faster than light through the sterile, gossip-starved corridors of The Anvil. As they exited the pod bay, the atmosphere in the common areas was electric. Recruits were everywhere. They were lingering, clustered in small groups, the air thick with whispered speculation. Some were doing slow, cool-down stretches in the training area, their eyes following the trio. Through a reinforced window, the unlucky few being "straightened out" in the Grinder paused their suffering to watch the commotion outside.
Recruits who usually looked straight through Kaelan, their eyes sliding over him as if he were part of the furniture, now glanced his way, their gazes lingering, dissecting. He saw the questions in their eyes, sharp and unspoken: That's the new one? The one who was dead last on the board? The clumsy one? How?
Jax, basking in the reflected glory, was immediately swarmed. He was a known quantity in The Anvil—a loudmouth, yes, but a surprisingly resilient and likable one. In a place designed to crush spirit, his relentless, almost pathological optimism was a weird, flickering candle in the dark. People were drawn to it, even if they didn't admit it. Now, he was at the center of a genuine upset.
"Jax!No way you beat Cain's time! What was the play?"
"Who was your third?Elara, right? She's solid. And who's the other guy? The quiet one?"
Jax grinned,slapping backs and playing the role of the triumphant general to the hilt. "Teamwork, ladies and gentlemen! Precision, coordination, and a healthy dose of pure, unadulterated crazy!" He jerked a thumb towards Kaelan, who was trying to become one with the wall. "My roomie here went in with nothing but a knife. A combat knife! No rifle, no backup, just cold, hard steel. The man's got stones of titanium and a death wish, and I am here for it!"
Kaelan ignored the stares and the rising buzz of conversation. He tried to melt into the cinderblock, to follow the yellow line's unerring path back to the barracks and the temporary, silent sanctuary of his cell. But the path was blocked.
A large recruit with a shaved head and the number 27 stenciled on his chest stepped in front of him, his thick arms crossed over a barrel chest. "Hey. New guy. Walker, right? I'm Marcus." His voice was like gravel. "That was some run you pulled off. We're putting together a study group for the next tactical sim. Could use someone with... unpredictable instincts. Shake things up."
Kaelan didn't break stride. He sidestepped Marcus as if he were just another piece of scenery, his eyes fixed on a scuff mark on the floor ten feet ahead.
"Hey, I'm talking to you!" Marcus called after him, his voice tinged with irritation at being so easily dismissed.
Another recruit, a wiry woman with sharp, avian features and the number 39 on her sleeve, fell into step beside him, her pace matching his. "Ignore Marcus. He's a blunt instrument. But he's not wrong. You made a splash. People are curious. An alliance could be mutually beneficial. You scratch my back..." she let the phrase hang, suggestive and transactional.
Kaelan didn't even turn his head. He just kept walking, his silence a wall as solid and impenetrable as the foundations of The Anvil itself. He felt their eyes on his back—curious, calculating, some openly annoyed. He heard the fragments of whispers, the digital campfire gossip spreading.
"...just completely blanked Sienna..."
"...who does he think he is?"
"...went in with a knife,I heard. Just a knife. Psycho."
"...is it true?Vance himself? That's what Jax just said. The Commander doesn't do field work..."
The rumor was out. Jax, in his unfiltered exuberance, had lit the fuse. Vance's personal pick. The words hung in the air, thick and heavy, adding a new layer of mystique and simmering resentment to his already complicated presence. He was no longer just the clumsy new fish; he was a political statement, a question mark with the Director's signature scrawled beside it.
He didn't care about their alliances or their curiosity. It wasn't a conscious decision to be antisocial; it was a deeply ingrained survival reflex. The concept of 'friends' was so foreign, so alien to his life experience, that it felt like trying to crave a color he'd never seen. His childhood had been a series of rapidly changing schools and hastily abandoned neighborhoods, a procession of faces that blurred into a single, monolithic memory of initial pity and subsequent avoidance. Friendship was a liability. Connection was a crack in his armor, a weakness where the universe could wedge its fingers in and tear him open from the inside out. Every time he'd ever let his guard down, something—or everything—had been taken away.
Vance recruited you personally.
The thought was a cold, hard ember in his chest. Why? What had the Commander seen in the walking wreckage of his life? It wasn't out of kindness. Men like Alistair Vance didn't deal in kindness; they dealt in assets and liabilities. He saw a tool. A specific, broken, seemingly useless tool that, for reasons known only to him, fit a specific, broken job. Kaelan's hand curled into a fist at his side, his nails biting into his palm. Fine. If he was a tool, he would become the sharpest, hardest, most unbreakable tool in the box. He would stop being passive. He would stop just enduring the blows. He would start throwing them.
A memory suddenly sprung up in his mind again. It was something he could never forget. Something he thought of everyday. His father, John Walker, kneeling in the sun-drenched grass, placing the sheathed dagger in his small hands. The weight of it, surprising and solid.
"This isn't a toy, son. It's a tool. A last resort. But more than that, it's a reminder. A good soldier adapts, Kaelan. You remember that. No matter the terrain, no matter the odds, no matter how damn dark it gets. You look, you learn, you adapt. You find a way."
The words, once a comforting mantra from a giant, now felt like a command from a ghost. Adapt. He had spent his life adapting to failure, to loss, to the relentless, grinding hostility of fate. But that was a defensive adaptation. A retreat. This was different. The simulation had shown him a glimpse of another way. The knife in his hand hadn't been a last resort; it had been a choice. A statement. He had adapted to the simulation's rules and, for a time, mastered them.
He would climb. He would fight this cursed universe for every inch, for every single, miserable position on that damned leaderboard. He would get to the top of this hellish Anvil, and he would look Vance in the eye and demand to know why. And maybe, just maybe, in some way he couldn't yet articulate, making it to the top would be a way to finally, finally, prove that John Walker's son wasn't just a victim of circumstance. He was a soldier. And he would adapt, and he would overcome.
********************
The common area was a study in social dynamics, and Cain was its unmoved center. He wasn't training; he was observing, his presence a stabilizing force in the suddenly turbulent ecosystem. He stood near the weapon racks, not touching anything, simply existing as a benchmark. He didn't look up as the whispers spread through the room like a low-grade fever, carried on the hushed, excited tones of recruits who had just witnessed an upset that challenged the natural order.
He didn't need to look. He could feel the shift in the atmosphere, a subtle change in pressure, a re-routing of attention that was as tangible to him as the cold steel of the racks beside him.
Two recruits flanked him, his usual shadows. Roric, number 03, built like a bulldog with a perpetual scowl etched onto his face, and Silas, number 07, slender and sharp-eyed, whose intelligence was as much a weapon as his near-perfect marksmanship scores.
Roric was the first to break the silence, his voice a low, grating growl. "Jax. And the quiet one, Elara. And the new fish, Walker. They beat your time." He said it like an accusation, as if the very concept was a personal insult to him, to Cain, to the universe itself.
Cain's gaze remained fixed on a point on the far wall, his expression impassive. "I am aware." His voice was flat, devoid of emotion. The information was data. Data to be processed.
"How?" Roric pressed, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of a rack. "Jax is a loudmouth, all flash and no discipline. Elara's smart, I'll give her that, but she's not a frontline fighter. And Walker..." He spat the name. "He's a weirdo. He's the one who fell on his face during the first mile. The one who somehow broke a harness during the deadlift. He's a walking accident."
Silas, who had been quietly observing the room, his eyes cataloging every whispered conversation, finally spoke, his voice soft but carrying an undeniable sharpness. "The 'how' is the interesting part, Roric. The initial reports from the pod bay are... inconsistent. Jax is boasting to anyone who will listen that the new recruit, Walker, used only a knife. No primary firearm. Just a knife."
Cain's head turned a fraction of an inch, a tell so minute only someone watching as closely as Silas would have noticed. A knife. In a prolonged, wave-based survival simulation against ranged and explosive opponents. It was either the act of a raving madman, a complete fool, or a statement of such profound, unshakeable confidence that it bordered on arrogance. He immediately discarded the first two options. Vance did not recruit madmen or fools. The Director recruited weapons. Specialized, often flawed, but always purposeful weapons.
"And," Silas continued, leaning forward slightly, his voice dropping even though no one was close enough to hear, "the prevailing rumor, which Jax himself apparently confirmed to a half-dozen people, is that Commander Vance recruited Walker personally. Pulled him out of a debtor's prison himself."
That finally got a visible reaction. Cain's eyes lifted, meeting Silas's gaze. The calm in his ice-blue eyes was absolute, a placid lake over deep, cold waters, but a new, sharp intensity had ignited in its depths. A personal recruitment by the Director was unprecedented in the modern era of The Anvil. It marked the new recruit as something special, a potential rival operating on a different level of expectation and scrutiny entirely. It wasn't just about beating a time; it was about challenging a paradigm.
Around them, a small crowd of lower-ranked recruits lingered like satellites, hoping for a scrap of attention, a word of wisdom, a nod of acknowledgment from their undisputed king. Cain's eyes swept over them without seeing them. Their presence was a given, a resource to be managed, not a relationship to be nurtured. Their noise was background static, their hopes and fears irrelevant to the signal he was trying to decipher. They were part of the environment, like the lighting or the temperature. They didn't matter.
"The new variable," Cain said, his voice quiet, yet it possessed a curious quality that silenced the immediate space around them. "We will adjust our models. We will observe." His gaze swept across the common area with the dispassionate efficiency of a targeting system, effortlessly finding Kaelan Walker, who was moving like a phantom through the crowds, his eyes fixed on some internal horizon. "A man who is personally chosen by Vance and chooses to fight with a knife is not trying to survive. He is making a statement. He is either the most dangerous person in this facility, or he will be dead within the month." Cain's eyes narrowed slightly. "There is no middle ground.
********************
Elara did not linger in the noisy, inefficient chaos of the common areas. The social din was a drain on cognitive resources, a pointless expenditure of energy that yielded no valuable data. She retreated to the relative quiet of her cell in Barracks D, the sterile environment a welcome contrast to the emotional turbulence outside.
Her roommate, Lena, number 48, was already there, lying on her bunk and sketching something intricate on a small, personal datapad—a rare, contraband luxury. Lena was an artist, a master forger by trade before her "recruitment," and her presence was a constant, low-level irritant in Elara's meticulously ordered world. Stray charcoal smudges on the sink, the faint, acrid smell of ozone from her illicitly modified hardware, the unpredictable waves of emotional volatility—it was all messy. Illogical. But after weeks of forced proximity, a strange, dysfunctional symbiosis had formed. Lena's chaos sometimes sparked connections Elara's pure logic missed, and Elara's stability provided an anchor Lena secretly craved.
"The whole bay is talking about you," Lena said without looking up from her drawing, which appeared to be a disturbingly accurate caricature of Instructor Shale. "You, the motormouth, and the newbie. Toppled King Cain from his digital throne. How in the hell did you manage that? Did Cain's pod short-circuit? Don't tell me you found an exploit. I want in."
Elara placed her hands on her desk, squaring them perfectly with the edge. She didn't answer immediately, running the simulation through her mind's eye for the hundredth time, isolating frames. The flawless, almost telepathic coordination for the first hour and forty-seven minutes. The way Walker had moved through the refinery's guts, a study in lethal, silent economy, his knife an extension of his will. And then... the stumble. Not a misjudgment, but a literal stumble, as if the floor had betrayed him. The localized glitches. The Buzzer that seemed to break its own programming to target him. The inexplicable, cascading collapse that felt less like a failure of skill and more like a systemic rejection.
"He used a knife," Elara said finally, her voice flat, stating a fact.
Lena snorted, a short, sharp sound of disbelief. She finally looked up, her eyes bright with amusement. "No, seriously. What was the strat? Some new hack on the pod software? A weakness in the drone pathing you haven't told anyone about?"
"I am serious. A standard-issue combat knife. That was his selected loadout. His only loadout."
There was a long pause. Lena put her datapad down, the stylus clattering onto the thin mattress. "You're telling me," she said slowly, enunciating each word, "that you beat Cain's untouchable record... with a guy whose primary strategy was running at drones with a pointy stick?"
"It was not a 'pointy stick'. It was a carbon-steel combat knife. And his strategic contribution was... effective." Elara hesitated, a rare fissure in her usual certainty. The suspicion was a hard, cold knot in her gut, an outlier data point that refused to be normalized or explained away by any logical model. "Until it wasn't."
"What does that mean? Did he get bored and decide to take a nap?"
"It means the run's success was directly correlated to his performance.And its failure was a direct result of... externalities affecting him." She shook her head slightly, dismissing the unprovable, almost supernatural theory. "It doesn't matter. The result is recorded. The data is what it is."
Lena stared at her, a slow, incredulous smile spreading across her face. "You have no idea what happened, do you? The great Elara, baffled. Stumped by the clumsy new recruit." She picked up her datapad again, a low chuckle escaping her.
********************
Kaelan finally reached the relative quiet of Barracks A, the heavy door closing behind him with a solid thud that muted the world outside. He could still hear the faint, booming timbre of Jax's voice, holding court with a captivated group of recruits just outside the door, the words muffled but the triumphant, embellished energy palpable. Jax was in his element, the storyteller, and the story was getting taller with every retelling. He was probably claiming Kaelan had taken down a drone with a thrown pebble by now.
Let him talk, Kaelan thought, not with annoyance, but with a strange, detached acceptance. Jax's chatter was a force of nature, as constant and meaningless as the hum of the ventilation. It was background noise.
He slipped past the group without a word, a ghost moving through their celebration. Jax caught his eye through the closing door and gave him an enthusiastic, wide-eyed thumbs-up, which Kaelan met with a blank stare before turning away. He entered the room and leaned against the door for a moment, the solid, cool metal a relief against his back. The silence was a physical presence, welcome and familiar.
He could still hear the chatter outside, muffled but clear enough.
"...really?Just a knife? No, I don't believe it."
"...Jax said it's true,Vance himself went and got him... pulled him out of a supermax, I heard!"
"...does he ever talk?Like, at all?"
"...looks so...normal. Like a strong wind would knock him over. How'd he last that long?"
He tuned it out. Let them talk. Let them call him a psycho or a jinx or Vance's pet project. Let them dissect his every move. The noise was irrelevant, static against the new signal forming in his mind. For the first time, he had a goal that was his own, born not from desperate circumstance, but from a flicker of something that felt dangerously like purpose. The memory of his father's voice was no longer a sad echo from a lost past; it was a compass.
He walked to his bunk and sat down, the cover creaking under his weight. He stared at his hands, turning them over in the light. They were the same hands that had fumbled the deadlift bar, that had slipped on the rope during the assessment, that had always seemed to betray him. But in the pod, for a glorious, extended stretch, they had been steady. They had been sure. They had been his father's hands.
He wasn't here to make friends. He wasn't here to be liked or understood. He was here to fight. Not just the other recruits, or the instructors, or the brutal simulations.
He was here to fight the universe itself. And for the first time, he wasn't just going to stand there and take the blows. He was going to learn how to parry. He was going to learn how to strike back. The climb, the real one, began now.