just met. Nothing more than an ashen silhouette from another time. Only I remembered the relief we’d felt when we stood with our backs pressed against each other. Only I had experienced the electricity that flowed between us when our eyes met in implicit understanding. Only I felt a sense of longing and devotion.
Before I joined the army, I saw a show about a man in love with a woman who’d lost her memory in an accident. He must have gone through something like what I was going through now. Hopelessly watching all the things you love in the world being carried away on the wind while you stand by powerless to prevent it.
“I’m-well…” I didn’t even know what to say to her this time, despite the previous loop.
“This your clever way of getting the two of us out of there?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Good. Now where exactly are we?” Rita spun on her heel as she took in her surroundings.
We stood in a wide space bordered on one side by the barbed-wire barricade and a chain-link fence on the other three. Weeds sent shoots of green through the cracks in the concrete that covered the roughly ten- thousand-square-meter enclosure.
“The No. 3 Training Field.”
I’d managed to take us from one training field to another. Smooth. I’d been spending too much time with Ferrell. His love of training bordered on serious mental illness, and it had started to rub off on me.
Rita turned back to me. “It’s kind of bleak.”
“Sorry.”
“No, I like the emptiness of it.”
“You have unusual tastes.”
“Is that even a taste? The place I grew up was hopelessly empty. We didn’t have any oceans, though. The sky out here is-it’s so brilliant,” she said, her head tilted back.
“You like it? The sky?”
“Not the sky so much as the color of it. That shimmering blue.”
“Then why’s your Jacket red?”
A few moments of silence passed between us before she spoke again.
“The sky in Pittsfield is so washed out. Like the color of water after you’ve rinsed out a paintbrush with blue paint in it. Like all the water in the ground rushed up in the sky and thinned it.” I gazed at Rita. She looked back at me, rich brown eyes staring into mine. “Sorry. Forget I said that,” she said.
“How come?”
“It wasn’t a very Rita Vrataski thing to say.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do.”
“Well, I thought it was nice,” I said.
Rita opened her eyes wide. For an instant, they flashed with a glint of the Full Metal Bitch. The rest of her face remained still. “What’d you say?”
“I said it sounded nice.”
She looked surprised at that. A lock of rust-colored hair fell to her forehead, and she raised her hand to play with it. I caught a glimpse of her eyes from between her fingers. They were filled with a strange light. She looked like a girl whose heart strings had begun to unravel, a child whose lies had been laid bare by the piercing gaze of her mother.
I broke the awkward silence. “Is something wrong?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t making fun of you. It’s just something I wanted to say. Guess I didn’t get the timing right.”
“We’ve had a conversation like this before in an earlier loop, haven’t we? But only you remember,” Rita said.
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“No, it doesn’t bother me,” she said, shaking her head.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Tell me what you’re planning.”
“Well, there’s a lot I still don’t understand,” I said. “I need you to explain how to end the loop, for starters.”
“I’m asking what you’re planning to do next so I don’t have to think about it.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“I’m dead serious.”
“But you’re Rita Vrataski. You always know what to do.”
“It will be fun being the one outside the loop for a change.”
“Not much fun for me,” I said. I wondered what she meant by saying “will”; I thought she’d been freed from the loop already, after 211 times through thirty hours in Florida. I opened my mouth to ask, but she interrupted.
“I think I’ve earned the right to sit back and watch,” she said. “I’ve had to handle enough shit as it is. It’s your turn. The sooner you accept that, the better.”
I sighed. “I know.”
“Hey, don’t blame me.”
“Well then, it’s still a little early, but my next stop is the cafeteria. I hope you’re in the mood for Japanese food.”
The cafeteria was noisy. In one corner, a group of soldiers was seeing who could do the most push-ups in three minutes. Another group we walked past was playing gastronomic chicken with a mystery liquid that looked like a combination of ketchup, mustard, and orange juice. At the far end of the room some guy was singing a folk song-or maybe it was an old anime theme song-that had been popular at least seventy years ago, complete with banjo accompaniment. One of the feed religions had originally used it as an anti-war song, but that wasn’t the sort of detail that bothered guys who signed up with the UDF. The tune was easy to remember, and that’s all it took to be a hit with a crowd of Jacket jockeys.
Let’s all join the ar-my!
Let’s all join the ar-my!
Let’s all join the ar-my!
And kill ourselves some things!
I’d watched all this 159 times. But since I’d been caught in the loop, I hardly noticed a thing about the world outside my own head that didn’t directly pertain to my way out of here. I sat quietly in a small, gray cafeteria, devoid of sound, methodically shoveling tasteless food into my mouth.
Even if tomorrow’s battle went well, some of the soldiers here wouldn’t be coming back. If it went poorly, even fewer would return. Everybody knew it. The Armored Infantry was Santa Claus, and battle was our Christmas. What else for the elves to do on Christmas Eve but let their hair down and drink a little eggnog.
Rita Vrataski was sitting across from me, eating the same lunch for the 160th time. She examined her 160th umeboshi.
“What is this?”
“ Umeboshi. It’s ume-people call it a plum, but it’s more like an apricot-dried in the sun, and then pickled. You eat it.”
“What’s it taste like?”
“Food is like war. You have to experience it for yourself.”
She poked at it two or three times with her chopsticks, then threw caution to the wind and put the whole thing in her mouth. The sourness hit her like a body blow from a heavyweight fighter and she doubled over, grabbing at her throat and chest. I could see the muscles twitching in her back.
“Like it?”
Rita worked her mouth without looking up. Her neck tensed. Something went flying out of her mouth-a perfectly clean pit skidded to a halt on her tray. She wiped the edges of her mouth as she gasped for breath.
“Not sour at all.”
“Not at this cafeteria,” I said. “Too many people from overseas. Go to a local place if you want the real stuff.”
