I filed onto an elevator with fifteen other recruits. They varied drastically in age, gender, and ethnicity, but all of them wore a variation of the same dazed expression, which I knew was probably also mirrored on my own face.
As the elevator descended, we all stood there in silence, staring at the ceiling, our shoes, or at closed doors in front of us—anything to avoid making eye contact. I wondered where each of them had been and what’d they been doing earlier that morning, when an Earth Defense Alliance shuttle had appeared out of nowhere to shatter their notion of reality, yank them out of their lives, and bring them here.
I also found myself wondering if I’d ever played Terra Firma or Armada with any of these people. It seemed possible—even probable. Hell, for all I knew, one of the men—or women—standing beside me could be the famed RedJive, in the flesh.
The elevator car had no floor indicator or control panel, just a single down arrow that lit up and beeped about twice every second as the car descended deeper and deeper belowground. I counted over twenty of those beeps before the doors finally opened again.
We stepped off the elevator into a large circular lobby that was already clogged with a procession of disoriented recruit candidates like ourselves. Most were dressed in their normal street clothes like me, but for a wide variety of different climates. I also spotted people in business suits, fast food uniforms, surgical scrubs, and one dazed-looking middle-aged woman who was wearing a wedding dress and still clutching her bridal bouquet.
A line of EDA soldiers stationed around the lobby herded everyone through a long row of doors, into the adjacent sunken auditorium. As I filed into it with the others, I swiveled my head around to survey the layout. The enormous bowl-shaped auditorium had stadium-style seating that faced an enormous curved projection screen, making it look more like an IMAX theater than a top-secret underground briefing room. But the ceiling was a different story—it was a long, sloping grid of concrete waffle slabs, each reinforced with shock-absorption springs at its center. Like the rest of the base, the auditorium looked as if it had been built to withstand a direct nuclear blast on the surface above.
I swept my gaze around the auditorium, trying to decide where I should sit. At the foot of the giant screen, I noticed a low rectangular stage with a podium at its center. The first thirty or so rows in front of it were already filled with nervous recruits, and a steady stream of new ones were filing in and filling up the rows behind them, one after another, the way we did at school assemblies. But a few dozen less conformist (or more antisocial) individuals had chosen to sit much farther back, either by themselves or in scattered small groups.
I began to climb the nearest staircase, heading for the least populated seats in the upper third of the auditorium. Once I reached the nosebleed section, I began to look for a sufficiently isolated seat—then I froze in midstep.
She was just off to my right, sitting all alone in a deserted row near the back, taking brazen pulls from a chrome hip flask painted to look like R2-D2. Even seated, I could tell she must be a few inches taller than me. Her pale, alabaster skin contrasted sharply with her dark clothing—black combat boots, black jeans, and a black tank top (which didn’t fully conceal the black bra she was wearing underneath.) She had a spiky wave of black hair that was buzzed down one side and chin-length on the other. But the real kicker were her tattoos, on each arm: on the left was a beautiful seminude rendering of the comic book heroine Tank Girl, adorned in postapocalyptic rock lingerie and smooching an M16. On her right bicep, in stylized capital letters, were the words El Riesgo Siempre Vive.
Seeing her was almost as jarring as when I’d first glimpsed that Glaive Fighter the previous afternoon. I had fallen for Ellen gradually, over a period of months. But this—this was like taking a lightning bolt from Mjolnir straight to the forehead.