Parry. Thrust. Swipe. Step back. Parry. Spin around. Thrust.
Adya goes over the moves nonstop for almost thirty minutes. She’d watched a sparring pair across the room the day before and searched around a few servers for instructions; considering how limited her access is, all she’d managed to find were a handful of diagrams. She tries to replicate the moves to the best of her knowledge. Learning the correct terminology will have to wait.
She spent most of yesterday learning disarming techniques from Val. By the end of the day, she could easily snatch a handgun from an opponent’s grip, but the day felt longer and longer with every repetition of grab the barrel. Smack my wrist. Move out of the line of fire. Aim it back at me. Repeat. Nate and Murphy give Adya plenty of breaks when they train her, but Val seems to follow different teaching methods.
It’s quite early and the room isn’t all that full, but no one pays much mind to her. It only took a whopping forty-eight hours for her name to go out of circulation among the agents. They only offer her a quick glance when her wooden staff clatters to the floor. Skills with a melee weapon are sure to come in handy, but if Goddard allows her to specialize in a weapon, it certainly won’t be a staff. Murphy made it look so easy. She drops it one too many times and retires to the side of the room.
She traces the indents in her palms that the staff left. If there was blood in her hands, her knuckles would be pure white from how tight she’d been gripping it. Just as equally as she appreciates how real her skin looks and feels, she finds it to be a hindrance in her sense of touch. Smooth, bronze hands gives way too dull, gray titanium as the artificial skin on her forearms retracts into her shoulders. Her… mechanical features are few and far between, since the objective was to make her look as human as possible; but since entirely seamless, synthetic skin was impossible at the time, adding a few extra frills couldn’t hurt. Plus, in the event that the skin was damaged, it’d be easy to replace this way. She combs a few gentle fingers through her ponytail, careful not to snag any rigid metal corners in it. She grabs the wooden staff from the ground and starts again. Parry. Thrust. Swipe. Step back. Parry. Spin around. Thrust.
“How long have you been down here by yourself, Cadet?” someone says from the doorway. Everyone snaps upright, even the agents across the room who haven’t been cadets in many years. Adya whips her head around. Her gaze snags on a middle-aged woman with gray padding on her uniform and the slightest suggestion of graying hair.
“I…” Adya stutters. Third day and I blew it. It hasn’t even been a week and I’m already gonna get told off for something.
“General Morales!”
Nate slips out from behind the one-way glass, trotting over to his cadet. “She hasn’t been by herself,” Nate says. “Do you need something?”
Her brow furrows for a second but she looks disinterested in questioning him any further. “We have a new shipment of shock rounds coming in, but I need someone to pick them up. The rest of your team doesn’t come in until noon, and they’re not holding onto this shipment forever. It’s just across town.”
“Shock rounds?” Adya asks.
“Nonlethal bullets. They target and overload the nervous system and knock a target unconscious for anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes.” Nate tosses his bag into a cubby against the wall after stuffing his jacket into it. “Yes, General, I can get them. Been a long time since I was Goddard’s errand boy.”
General Morales’s expression softens as she leans closer to Adya. “I sent him on so many trips around town when he was a cadet,” she says like a mother telling an embarrassing story about her son. “Every time I could see that his impatience was getting to him, I’d send him on a drive. Served him well.”
Nate throws his hair into a messy ponytail to keep it out of his face, but only half of it is long enough to stay within the elastic. “What do you think, Adya? Wanna run an errand with me?”
“Sure,” she says. As a cadet, Adya hopes that she won’t suffer the same fate that her mentor did. It’s not what she was expecting her first full day to look like, but it’s not like she has much of a choice. Soon enough, the General is out of sight and Nate is idly rambling about something. She only tunes in when Nate’s done sorting through his backpack in search of his keys.
“Your arms are really cool, by the way. Val is gonna be jealous that the skin is retractable,” he comments.
Adya now remembers what she was doing before the interruption. She hugs her rigid, metal arms to her chest and wants to collapse the rest of her body into a compact cube.
“Everything okay?”
“I forgot you could see them,” Adya says. “I mean, my arms. I mean--”
“The bionics?” He chuckles and spins his car keys around his finger. “I don’t care. I’m more than used to it.”
“I just thought that… since you don’t have any that it might freak you out. Also since they don’t normally look like this.” She reaches her hands out in front of her slowly and Nate takes a long look. The synthetic skin returns to her forearms and she adds, “Unless your bionics are internal, in which case, that’s none of my business. I feel bad for assuming. What were we talking about again?”
She expects at least a raised eyebrow from her mentor, but Nate smiles and starts making his way toward the open garage door. “Don’t remember. But time’s a-wasting and the General will rip me a new one if we don’t leave now. I refuse to be publicly embarrassed now that I have to set an example.”
Dozens of transport trucks are lined up across the back lot. Adya watches an agent shut the back of one, tap on the door twice, and dive out of the way as the vehicle speeds down the road. Not a single second is wasted in the process. She can almost see herself in the sleek uniform and its tough, off-black padding.
The warehouse lobby smells of hand sanitizer and rust remover and the occasional, sudden clang comes from behind the employee door. Still, the sensations intrigue Adya. Just as much as she’s excited to train at Goddard, she’s excited to go places and see, hear, and smell things for the first time through new eyes, ears, and a new nose. Nate makes small talk with the clerk at the desk while the other employees load six crates of grade A shock rounds into his trunk.
Hung up on the left wall is a portrait of about a dozen agents. They’re littered across the frame, some crouching in silly poses and others doing their best to look as deadpan as possible. Adya manages to pick out a young Elora, crouched down right in the middle. Instead of the small, wiry head of hair she usually sports, it’s twisted into dozens of longer braids. Her smile at thirty years old is just as bright as her smile at fifty. She runs her fingers over the plaque: Goddard Institute of Cybernetics - Opening Day.
The opposite wall houses a bulletin board covered in magazine clippings. From celebrities with bionics to articles about the ACA’s leading bionicists to advertisements about cosmetic surgery, there isn’t a single area of cybernetics that isn’t tackled in this collage. Near the bottom, she finds a familiar headline: Adya Milana Prisham, 17, Becomes First Successful Mind Transfer. She was never fond of that phrasing. The word ‘first’ gives people tunnel vision and they forget to see that it precedes ‘successful’.
After signing a few forms and shaking hands with Nate, the clerk ambles out from behind his desk and walks them to the door. His steps are slow, giving Adya as much time as possible to keep checking out his wares.
“We’ve been providing for Goddard since they opened their doors,” he says, noticing his customer’s curiosity. “I gotta hand it to them-- people didn’t trust the whole ‘replacing cops’ idea that the ACA came up with, but the agents brought them around. Saved my ass once or twice when some thugs tried to rob me.”
Footsteps across the asphalt come to a stop.
“How about a third time?” a woman chimes in from behind. Adya notices the motorcycle helmet hiding her identity first, and the loaded gun second.
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