Reboot (2 page)

I screamed as they branded my wrist with my bar code, my number, and my human name, Wren Connolly. I screamed as they locked me in a cell, as they escorted me to the shuttle, as they put me in line with the other newly undead former children. I screamed until I arrived at the Human Advancement and Repopulation Corporation, or HARC, facility, and they told me screaming meant death. Acting like I was still a human child meant death. Disobeying orders meant death.

And then I was silent.

“DO YOU THINK THERE WILL BE A HOT ONE THIS TIME?” Ever asked as I smoothed my black shirt down to my pants.

“Didn’t you think Seventy-two was hot?” I asked, turning around to give her an amused look. She liked it when I looked amused.

“Kind of a jerk,” she said.

“Agreed.”

“I feel like we’ve had a real dry spell.”

I laced up my boots, genuine amusement sparking inside me. New Reboots arrived about every six weeks, a time many saw as an opportunity to replenish the dating pool.

We weren’t allowed to date, but the birth-control chip they shot into the females’ arms the first day suggested they knew that was one rule they couldn’t actually enforce.

For me, new Reboots meant only the start of a new training cycle. I didn’t date.

The lock on the door to our room clicked, like it did every morning at seven, and the clear door slid open. Ever stepped out, looping her long brown hair into a knot as she waited. She often waited for me in the morning so we could walk to the cafeteria together. I guessed this was a friend thing. I saw the other girls doing it, so I went along with it.

I joined her in the hallway and the pasty human standing just outside our door shrank back at the sight of me. She pulled the stack of clothes she was carrying closer to her chest, waiting for us to leave so she could drop them on our beds. No human working at HARC wanted to enter a small, enclosed space with me.

Ever and I headed down the hallway, eyes straight forward. The humans built glass walls so they could see our every movement. Reboots tried to afford one another a smidgen of privacy. The halls were quiet in the mornings, the only sounds the occasional murmur of voices and the soft hum of the air-conditioning.

The cafeteria was one floor down, through a pair of big red doors that warned of the dangers inside. We stepped into the room, which was blindingly white except for the clear glass that lined the upper portion of one wall. HARC officers were stationed on the other side, behind the guns mounted to the glass.

Most of the Reboots were already there, hundreds of them sitting on little round plastic seats at long tables. The rows of bright eyes shining out against pale skin looked like a string of lights down every table. The smell of death hung in the air, causing most humans who entered to wrinkle their noses. I rarely noticed anymore.

Ever and I didn’t eat together. Once we got our food, she split off to the table for the Under-sixties with her tray and I sat down at the table for One-twenties and higher. The only one who came close to my number was Hugo, at One-fifty.

Marie One-thirty-five nodded at me as I sat down, as did a few others, but Reboots over 120 minutes dead were not known for their social skills. There was rarely much talking. The rest of the room was noisy, though; the chatter of Reboots filled the cafeteria.

I bit into a piece of bacon as the red doors at the end of the room opened and a guard marched in, followed by the newbies. I counted fourteen. I’d heard a rumor the humans were working on a vaccine to prevent Rebooting. It didn’t look like they’d succeeded yet.

There were no adults among them. Reboots over the age of twenty were killed as soon as they Rebooted.
If
they Rebooted. It was uncommon.

“They ain’t right,” a teacher once told me when I asked why they shot the adults. “The kids ain’t all there anymore, but the adults . . . they ain’t right.”

Even from a distance, I could see some of the newbies shaking. They ranged in age from about eleven or twelve to older teenagers, but the terror that radiated from them was the same. It would have been less than a month since they Rebooted, and it took most much longer to accept what had happened to them. They were placed in a holding facility at the hospital in their hometown for a few weeks to adjust until HARC assigned them to a city. We continued to age like normal humans, so Reboots under the age of eleven were held at the facility until they reached a useful age.

I’d had to spend only a few days at the holding facility, but it was one of the worst parts of Rebooting. The actual building where they kept us wasn’t bad, simply a smaller version of where I lived now, but the panic was constant, all consuming. We all knew there was a good possibility we would Reboot if we died (it was almost certain in the slums), but the reality of it was still horrifying. At first, anyway. Once the shock wore off and I made it through training, I realized I was much better off as a Reboot than I’d ever been as a human.

Rebooting itself was simply a different reaction to the KDH virus. KDH killed most people, but for some—the young, the strong—the virus worked differently. Even those who died of something other than KDH could Reboot, if they’d had the KDH virus even once in their lifetime. It Rebooted the body after death, bringing it back stronger, more powerful.

But also colder, emotionless. An evil copy of what we used to be, the humans said. Most would rather die completely than be one of the “lucky” ones who Rebooted.

The guards ordered the newbies to sit. They all did so quickly, already informed that they followed orders or got a bullet in the brain.

The guards left, letting the doors slam as they hurried out. Not even our hardened guards liked to be in the presence of so many Reboots at once.

The laughter and scuffling started right away, but I turned my attention back to my breakfast. The only newbie I had any interest in was my next trainee, but we wouldn’t be paired up until tomorrow. The Nineties liked to break ’em all in right away. Considering the speed at which we healed, I saw no problem with the newbies being roughed up a little. Might as well start toughening them up now.

The Nineties were rowdier than usual today. I shoved the last piece of bacon in my mouth as the hollering rose to an annoying level. I dropped my tray on top of the trash can and headed for the exit.

A flash of color streaked across the white floor, coming to a stop at my feet with a squeak. It was a newbie, shot down the slick tile like a toy. I just missed stepping on his head and planted my boot on the floor.

Blood trickled from his nose and a bruise had formed under one eye. His long, lanky legs were sprawled across the floor, his thin white T-shirt clinging to the frame of an underfed former human.

His close-cropped black hair matched his eyes, so dark I couldn’t find his pupils. They probably used to be brown. Brown eyes usually took on a golden sort of glow after death, but I liked his blackness. It was in stark contrast to the white of the cafeteria, to the glow of the other Reboots’ eyes.

No one came near him now that he was in my space, but someone yelled, “Twenty-two!” and laughed.

Twenty-two? That couldn’t be his number. I hadn’t seen anyone under forty in a few years. Well, there was a Thirty-seven last year, but she died within a month.

I nudged at his arm with my boot so I could see his bar code. Callum Reyes. Twenty-two.

I raised my eyebrows. He was only dead twenty-two minutes before he Rebooted. He was practically still human. My eyes shifted back to his face to see a smile spreading across his lips. Why was he smiling? This didn’t seem like an appropriate time to be smiling.

“Hi,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows. “Apparently they call me Twenty-two.”

“It’s your number,” I replied.

He smiled bigger. I wanted to tell him to stop it.

“I know. And yours?”

I pulled up my sleeve and turned my arm to reveal the
178
. His eyes widened and I felt a surge of satisfaction when his grin faltered.

“You’re One-seventy-eight?” he asked, hopping to his feet.

Even humans had heard of me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Really?” His eyes flicked over me quickly. His smile had returned.

I frowned at his doubt, and he laughed.

“Sorry. I thought you’d be . . . I don’t know. Bigger?”

“I can’t control my height,” I said, trying to pull myself up an extra inch or two. Not that it would help. He towered over me and I had to lift my chin to look him in the eye.

He laughed, although I had no idea at what. Was my height funny? His laugh was big, genuine, echoing across the now-silent cafeteria. It didn’t belong here, that laugh. He didn’t belong here, with those full lips curving up with actual happiness.

I sidestepped him to walk away, but he grabbed my wrist. A few Reboots gasped. No one touched me. They didn’t even come near me, except for Ever.

“I didn’t catch your name,” he said, turning my arm so he could see, oblivious to the fact that this was a weird thing to do. “Wren,” he read, releasing me. “I’m Callum. Nice to meet you.”

I frowned at him over my shoulder as I headed for the door. I didn’t know what it was to meet him, but
nice
was not the word I would have picked.

Newbie day was my favorite. As I headed into the gym later that morning with the other trainers, excitement rippled through my chest. I almost smiled.

Almost.

The newbies were sitting on the shiny wood floor in the center of the large room, next to several black mats. They turned away from the instructor to look at us, their faces tight with fear. It looked like no one had puked yet.

“Don’t look at them,” Manny One-nineteen barked. He was in charge of wrangling the newbies their first few days here. He’d been doing it for longer than I’d been here, and I figured it was because he was bitter about missing the opportunity to be a trainer by one minute.

All the newbies focused their attention on Manny except Twenty-two, who gave me that weird smile before turning around.

HARC medical personnel were lined up against the wall behind Manny, holding their clipboards and some tech equipment I couldn’t begin to understand. There were four of them today, three men and a woman, all dressed in their usual white lab coats. The doctors and scientists always came out to observe the newbies. Later, they would take them down to one of the medical floors to be poked and prodded.

“Welcome to Rosa,” Manny said, arms crossed over his chest, eyebrows low like he was trying to be scary. Didn’t fool me. Not now, and not when I was a twelve-year-old newbie.

“Your trainers will pick you tomorrow. Today they will observe you,” Manny continued. His voice echoed across the gym. It was a giant empty room with dingy white walls that had been stained with blood many times.

Manny began listing off their numbers and pointing for our benefit. The highest was One-twenty-one, a well-built older teenager who probably looked intimidating even as a human.

HARC coveted the higher numbers. Me, above all. My body had had more time than most to adapt to the change, so I regenerated and healed faster than anyone at the facility. Rebooting only occurred after every bodily function shut down. The brain, the heart, the lungs—everything had to go before the process could start. I’d heard the number of minutes dead referred to as a “rest,” a time for the body to regroup and refresh and prepare for what was next. The longer the rest, the better the Reboot.

Today was no different. Manny paired off newbies and ordered them to go at it, giving them a chance to impress us. One-twenty-one picked up the fighting quickly, his partner a bloody mess within minutes.

Callum Twenty-two spent more time on the floor than standing in front of his shorter, younger partner. He was clumsy and his long limbs went everywhere except where he wanted. He moved like a human—as though he’d never Rebooted at all. The lower numbers didn’t heal as fast and they had too much leftover human emotion.

When humans first began rising from the dead they called it a “miracle.” Reboots were a cure for the virus that had wiped out most of the population. They were stronger and faster and almost invincible.

Then, as it became apparent a Reboot wasn’t the human they’d known, but a sort of cold, altered copy, they called us monsters. The humans shut out the Reboots, banished them from their homes, and eventually decided the only course of action was to execute every one of them.

The Reboots retaliated, but they were outnumbered and lost the war. Now we are slaves. The Reboot project began almost twenty years ago, a few years after the end of the war, when HARC realized putting us to work was far more useful than simply executing every human who rose. We didn’t get sick; we could survive with less food and water than a human; we had a higher threshold for pain. We might have been monsters, but we were still stronger and faster and far more useful than any human army. Well, most of us anyway. The lower numbers were more likely to die in the field, making training them a waste of my time. I always picked the highest number.

“I give Twenty-two six months,” Ross One-forty-nine said from beside me. He rarely said much, but I got the feeling he enjoyed training as much as I did. It was exciting, the possibility of shaping a scared, useless Reboot into something much better.

“Three,” Hugo countered.

“Wonderful,” Lissy muttered under her breath. At One-twenty-four, she was the lowest of the trainers, and therefore got last pick of newbies. Twenty-two would be her problem.

“Maybe if you trained them better all your newbies wouldn’t get their heads chopped off,” Hugo said. Hugo had been my trainee two years ago, and he was just ending his first year as a trainer. He already had an excellent track record of keeping his newbies alive.

“Only one got his head chopped off,” Lissy said, pressing her hands against the messy curls that sprang from her head.

“The others were shot,” I said. “And Forty-five got a knife through the head.”

“Forty-five was hopeless,” Lissy spat. She glared at the floor, most likely lacking the courage to turn that glare on me.