Kate Day - In the Quick

I put my hands on my knees. I was breathing hard and my cheeks burned with embarrassment. But I forced myself to stand up straight.

Where are you supposed to be? Theresa asked.

There’s a problem with the cell, I said. Isn’t there? A degradation due to vibration.

Theresa frowned but James looked at me with interest.

Have you fixed it? I asked.

James seemed like he might answer but Theresa spoke first. You know we can’t talk to you about that. You should head back to your dorm.

Endurance and Inquiry are identical, I said. If there’s cell failure in one—

Lion caught up to me then and pulled me off the track and away from James and Theresa. What were you saying to them? he asked.

I know them.

They’re in the middle of training. And we’re technically not supposed to be on this track.

A few yards away Theresa bent down to stretch and when she stood up her headband slipped from her ears. James reached to push it back in place, leaning close, and for a moment he hugged her face with his two hands.

I don’t want to run anymore, I said to Lion.

All right. We’ll lift instead.

I watched James’s and Theresa’s blue figures become smaller and smaller as they jogged away. I don’t want to do that either.

Come on, he said. It’ll be fun.

We walked back toward the dormitories and Lion waved me into a building with old glass windows covered in frost. The only light came from two yellow bulbs in the ceiling, and the air was filled with dust motes and smelled like rust and old socks. Gradually my eyes adjusted. The room was full of complicated machines with black metal weights that looked like wheels and thick, taut wires.

Lion’s skin was darker in here than it was outside, and his eyes brighter. He showed me the machines crowding the room. Only a few steps separated them and it was a twisting maze to move from one to the next. A few pieces of equipment appeared new and had complex digital displays, but most of them were old.

I wanted to look more closely at a machine that resembled a mechanical butterfly, but Lion said, Come on, let’s get started. He waved me to a tall black metal frame with weights threaded onto cables that hung down to the floor. He removed all but one of the weights and showed me how to stand, face toward the metal frame, legs apart, and leaning like a stiff wind blew at my back. And how to hold the handles on the ends of the cables down by my sides.

My eyes strayed to the butterfly machine nearby; it had a panel at its back secured with a line of tiny screws, and I had a small screwdriver in my pocket. I pressed my thumb to its tip and thought of James and Theresa on the track, their cheeks flushed from the cold, and about NSP’s two explorers, Inquiry and Endurance —

Are you paying attention? Lion was pulling the handles up and his arm muscles flexed.

I let go of the screwdriver. Yes.

His face was solemn. He looked like he was concentrating hard, but not in his mind. In his body. Like his brain had left his head, had migrated down his shoulder and into his biceps.

He switched positions, held the cables behind his back with very straight arms, and lifted them behind him up, up. The flex of the muscles in the backs of his arms was slight, but I could still see it. He repositioned himself, moving his feet slightly, tilting his chest an inch forward. He started the movement again, and I could see it more—the bunching up of the muscles under his skin.

It made me think about the hand we were building in Materials lab and how it needed to be like Lion’s arm muscles. I saw it in my mind. It curved its fingers; it made a fist. But Lion’s muscles were soft, and the hand was hard—

Lion, I’ve been thinking about the hand.

He stood aside and held out the handles for me. We’re not doing that right now, he said. We’re doing this.

I took the handles and slowly and shakily brought them to my chest. They had stayed perfectly still and smooth for Lion, as if the cables, his body, and the movement were all part of the same thing. But when I pulled them to my chest, they quivered. They seemed to have a life of their own, and the more I pulled, the more they shook.

Keep going, Lion said. Three more.

The vibrating inside my body got worse. My face was hot, my feet inside my sneakers hotter. I tried to quiet my limbs but I couldn’t. I told my muscles to stop shaking, but they wouldn’t.

That’s what you want, he said. That shaking’s good.

I stopped. You didn’t shake.

With a heavier weight I would have. That’s how you know it’s working. The shaking tells you your muscles are learning.

I let the cables fall. My arms felt unsettlingly light. Wobbly, like the bones had turned soft inside them. Lion pointed at another machine, one that worked the leg muscles. He showed me how to sit reclined on its cracked padded seat and push a weighted bar out, out, out with flat feet. Finally we both did twenty squats and twenty lunges. By the time we were done my thighs and bottom ached and I felt unsteady all over. I asked if we were finished lifting, at least for now, and he said it would get easier and we would come back tomorrow.

It turned even colder, and the snowdrifts grew tall in the yard. Someone shoveled the walkway between the dormitory and the schoolrooms each day, and as the snow accumulated, the path became an icy tunnel with walls of snow on either side. One night the wind battered the metal walls of the dormitory so brutally it seemed it would knock them down. But I had more blankets now—I had traded my extra socks for them—and Carla beside me who always slept through the noise.

Most days before Materials, Lion and I lifted weights. I learned all the machines and got better. Every few days he added more weight. Most mornings before everyone was up Lion and I ran, sometimes on the track outside the dormitories, if the snow was cleared, and sometimes on the Candidate track. We usually saw one or two Explorer program trainees and sometimes caught a glimpse of Theresa and James and Simon.

I got better—slowly. Sometimes Lion would stop and watch me run.

That’s skipping! Not running!

I knew what he meant but didn’t know how to fix it.

Move your arms! he yelled the next time I came around. They should move with your legs.

I tried and it was a little better. Less of a shock, less of a PAM PAM every time. I moved my arms and moved my legs and moved my arms.

Better! But elbows in! he yelled. You look like a—

But I was too far away to hear what I looked like. I pulled my elbows in.

I look like a what? I asked, breathing hard, the next time around.

Like a chicken.

I pulled my elbows in more.

He got up and ran after me. He had his hood up and his puff of hair underneath made it look like he was even taller than he actually was. Hey, it’s a joke. He smiled and pumped his arms. Just try to match your stride to mine.

But his legs were so long. I couldn’t make my short legs go so far, but I tried. I made my stride as long as I could—so long it felt like leaping, so long my legs felt like they might come out of my hip sockets. My legs burned with the effort, and my nose ran, but it worked. My leaps fit just inside his stride.

There you go, Lion said. Now let’s speed up!

I was doing well in my classes. In math I was able to follow everything written on the whiteboard. I even went up to the board when prompted by Theresa, and what I wrote didn’t get erased. She started giving me extra problem sets so I could catch up on what I’d missed before I arrived at Peter Reed, and I brought the finished work to her office after classes were over. I liked her office. It was a small corner room she shared with James in the faculty building. There were two desks that faced each other and two chairs and a space heater on the floor. Notes and diagrams and schematics covered the walls.