“How would you know?”
“This is only the first time through today.”
“That again? How can a day have a first time or a second time?”
“Just hope you never find out.”
Murdoch made a show of shrugging. Rita returned her gaze to the unlucky men on the field.
Jacket jockeys didn’t have much use for muscle. Endurance was the order of the day, not stamina-draining burst power. To build their endurance, Rita’s squad practiced a standing technique from kung-fu known as ma bu. Ma bu consisted of spreading your legs as though you were straddling a horse and maintaining the position for an extended period of time. In addition to strengthening leg muscle, it was an extremely effective way to improve balance.
Rita wasn’t sure what benefit, if any, the iso push-ups were supposed to have. It looked more like punishment, plain and simple. The Japanese soldiers, packed together like sardines in a can, remained frozen in that one position. For them, this probably ranked among the worst experiences of their lives. Even so, Rita envied them this simple memory. Rita hadn’t shared that sort of throwaway experience with anyone in a long time.
The stifling wind tugged at her rust-red hair. Her bangs, still too long no matter how many times she cut them, made her forehead itch.
This was the world as it was at the start of the loop. What happened here only Rita would remember. The sweat of the Japanese soldiers, the whoops and jeers of the U.S. Special Forces- it would all be gone without a trace.
Maybe it would have been best not to think about it, but watching these soldiers training the day before an attack, sweat-soaked shirts sticking to their skin in the damp air, she felt sorry for them. In a way, this was her fault for bringing Murdoch along with her.
Rita decided to find a way to shorten the PT and put an end to this seemingly pointless exercise. So what if it instilled a samurai fighting spirit? They’d still wet themselves the first time they ran into a Mimic assault. She wanted to stop it, even if it was a sentimental gesture that no one but herself would ever appreciate.
Surveying the training field, Rita chanced upon a pair of defiant eyes staring directly at her. She was accustomed to being looked on with awe, admiration, even fear, but she’d never seen this: a look filled with such unbridled hatred from a complete stranger. If a person could shoot lasers from their eyes, Rita would have been baked crisper than a Thanksgiving turkey in about three seconds.
She had only met one other man whose eyes even approached the same intensity. Arthur Hendricks’s deep blue eyes had known no fear. Rita had killed him, and now those blue eyes were buried deep in the cold earth.
Judging by his muscles, the soldier staring at her was a rookie not long out of boot camp. Nothing like Hendricks. He had been an American, a lieutenant, and the commander of the U.S. Special Forces squad.
The color of this soldier’s eyes was different. His hair, too. His face and body weren’t even close. Still, there was something about this Asian soldier that Rita Vrataski liked.
2
Rita had often wondered what the world would be like if there were a machine that could definitively measure the sum of a person’s potential.
If DNA determined a person’s height or the shape of their face, why not their less obvious traits too? Our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers-ultimately every individual was the product of the blood that flowed in the veins of those who came before. An impartial machine could read that information and assign a value to it, as simple as measuring height or weight.
What if someone who had the potential to discover a formula to unlock the mysteries of the universe wanted to become a pulp fiction writer? What if someone who had the potential to create unparalleled gastronomic delicacies had his heart set on civil engineering? There is what we desire to do, and what we are able to do. When those two things don’t coincide, which path should we pursue to find happiness?
When Rita was young, she had a gift for two things: playing horseshoes and pretending to cry. The thought that her DNA contained the potential to become a great warrior couldn’t have been further from her mind.
Before she lost her parents when she was fifteen, she was an ordinary kid who didn’t like her carrot-top hair. She wasn’t particularly good at sports, and her grades in junior high school were average. There was nothing about her dislike of bell peppers and celery that set her apart. Only her ability to feign crying was truly exceptional. She couldn’t fool her mother, whose eagle eyes saw through her every ruse, but with anyone else she’d have them eating out of her hand after a few seconds of waterworks. Rita’s only other distinguishing feature was the red hair she’d inherited from her grandmother. Everything else about her was exactly like any other of over three hundred million Americans.
Her family lived in Pittsfield, a small town just east of the Mississippi River. Not the Pittsfield in Florida, not the Pittsfield in Massachusetts, but the Pittsfield in Illinois. Her father was the youngest child in a family of martial artists-mostly jujutsu. But Rita didn’t want to go to a military academy or play sports. She wanted to stay at home and raise pigs.
With the exception of the young men who signed up with the UDF, life for the people of Pittsfield was peaceful. It was an easy place to forget that humanity was in the middle of a war against a strange and terrible foe.
Rita didn’t mind living in a small town and never seeing anyone but the same four thousand people or so. Listening to the squeals of the pigs day in and day out could get a little tiresome, but the air was clean and the sky wide. She always had a secret spot where she could go to daydream and look for four-leaf clovers.
An old retired trader had a small general store in town. He sold everything from foodstuffs and hardware to little silver crosses that were supposed to keep the Mimics away. He carried all-natural coffee beans you couldn’t find anyplace else.
The Mimic attacks had turned most of the arable land in developing countries to desert, leaving luxury foods like natural coffee, tea, and tobacco extremely difficult to come by. They’d been replaced with substitutes or artificially flavored tastealikes that usually failed.
Rita’s town was one of many attempting to provide the produce and livestock needed by a hungry nation and its army.
The first victims of the Mimic attacks were also the most vulnerable: the poorest regions of Africa and South America. The archipelagos of Southeast Asia. Countries that lacked the means to defend themselves watched as the encroaching desert devoured their land. People abandoned the cultivation of cash crops-the coffee, tea, tobacco, and spices coveted in wealthier nations-and began growing staples, beans and sorghum, anything to stave off starvation. Developed nations had generally been able to stop the Mimic advance at the coastline, but much of the produce they had taken for granted disappeared from markets and store shelves overnight.
Rita’s father, who had grown up in a world where even Midwesterners could have fresh sushi every day, was, it is no exaggeration to say, a coffee addict. He didn’t smoke or drink-coffee was his vice. Often he would take Rita by the hand and sneak off with her to the old man’s store when Rita’s mother wasn’t watching.
The old man had skin of bronze and a bushy white beard.
When he wasn’t telling stories, he chewed the stem of his hookah hose between puffs. He spent his days surrounded by exotic goods from countries most people had never heard of. There were small animals wrought in silver. Grotesque dolls. Totem poles carved with the faces of birds or stranger beasts. The air of the shop was a heady mix of the old man’s smoke, untold spices, and all-natural coffee beans still carrying a hint of the rich soil in which they grew.
“These beans are from Chile. These here are from Malawi, in Africa. And these traveled all the way down the Silk Road from Vietnam to Europe,” he’d tell Rita. The beans all looked the same to her, but she would point, and the old man would rattle off their pedigrees.
“Got any Tanzanian in today?” Her father was well versed in coffee.
“What, you finish the last batch already?”
“Now you’re starting to sound like my wife. What can I say? They’re my favorite.”
